Opera has announced a new agentic AI feature for its browser AI, Aria. You can now manage your tabs by using Tab Commands.
The tab management feature supports natural language, so you can just tell it what to do.
How to use Aria AI’s Tab Commands in Opera
- Open the command line by pressing Ctrl and / hotkey. Mac users will need to use Cmd and /
- Type your command. e.g. group my YouTube tabs.
- Press Enter.
Note: Opera says that users with a keyboard layout from the Nordics, Germany, France, Italy, Brazil, Spain, Latam and Turkey will need these shortcuts to activate Aria: Ctrl Shift 7 or Cmd Shift 7.
When you execute the command, Aria AI will automatically group all your YouTube tabs together. It will also explain what was changed, and lets you choose whether to keep the results, or undo the changes.
You can also right-click on a tab and select AI Tab Management from the context menu, but this option only appears when you have 5 or more tabs open.
Besides using it to group tabs, you can also ask the AI to pin tabs, close tabs, and to save your session. Opera will create a tab island (tab group) to save your session by bookmarking the tabs.
Here is a YouTube video that demonstrates Tab Commands in action. And here’s a nice graphic that explains how the feature works.
Aria processes all tab related features locally, to protect your privacy and security. That’s cool. It can be really useful when you have dozens of tabs open, and you want to close tabs from a specific website, or pin them and close all other tabs. This serves as a useful shortcut which would otherwise require quite a bit of manual effort.
However, the AI-powered tool has some cons too, the main problem is that it is slow to respond. It’s also a bit of a hit-and-miss, i.e. it doesn’t work sometimes. In my tests, it seems to be a case of not identifying the name of websites. For example, it didn’t work with Steam, but it worked with Google, Amazon, YouTube tabs, probably because it was optimized to recognize the domains.
Opera’s AI fails to unpin tabs when you ask it to, and instead closes them, which might sound a bit silly. Pinning and unpinning go hand in hand, as do grouping and ungrouping, closing and reopening tabs. The reason why these commands do not work is because they don’t exist, not yet. Tab Commands are clearly still a work in progress, but it is an impressive feature.
Download Opera One from the official website to try out Tab Commands. This AI feature is not available in Opera Air and Opera GX.
Writing Mode 2.0 and Aria in a Tab
Speaking of Opera Air and GX, these browsers have also been updated. According to the official announcement, Aria AI now has an improved version of Writing Mode, which is called Writing Mode 2.0. You can use it to generate text, or fill in text fields.
Users can now access Aria directly in a browser tab, as opposed to using the hotkey, or from the sidebar panel. To do this, open Aria from the side panel, click on the panel icon in the top left corner, and then on the pop-out icon (box with an arrow) to move Aria to a tab. These features are also supported in Opera One.
Note: Pay attention to your choices when installing Opera browser on your computer. I also recommend checking the Privacy settings in the app to disable Telemetry options.