Today, we’re bringing together the past and future with Tab Commands – a new AI Feature Drop in Opera Developer that lets you manage your tabs by chatting with Aria, Opera’s browser AI. Tab Commands embody our innovation efforts with both tabs and AI as a tool within the browser.

You can now ask Aria to “Close my YouTube tabs” or “Group all my shopping tabs,” directly from the Command Line. With this feature, Opera is taking AI out of the chatbox or the context of a website to make it perform browser tasks for you. To open the Command Line, just press Ctrl+/ (CMD+/ on Mac).* 

To help you organize your tabs, Aria can close, group and pin tabs, as well as create bookmarks for you. This makes working with many tabs and managing them all at the same time a much less overwhelming experience.

Organizing your tabs with a single prompt to Aria

There are two ways to access Tab Commands and get your tabs organized within your Opera browser: the first is through the Command Line,* and the second is by right clicking any tab and choosing the AI Tab Management option.** Bear in mind that this feature can’t be triggered from the sidebar chat with Aria.

In the Command Line, you can prompt Aria to close, group, pin, or save your tabs as bookmarks. All you need to do is tell Aria what to do in the Command Line and voilà – Aria takes care of your tabs. If you right-click a tab and select AI Tab Management, you’ll get the following options to choose from: 

Let’s say you’re looking for a well-deserved vacation and are researching where to stay. Your browser might very well end up looking like this:

After you’ve finally found a good place to stay, you’ll need to clean up your browser before heading out on your voyage. Instead of closing every tab one by one, you can speed things up by asking Aria to do it. Just open the Command Line and type “Close all my vacation related tabs.”

Aria will do it instantly, and give you a quick recap of what was done, as well as the option to keep the changes or to undo them – in case you accidentally closed something you wanted to keep.

How it works behind the scenes

When asking Aria to organize your tabs, the only data processed by the AI is the prompt you provided (e.g. “close all my vacation related tabs”), and nothing else. This means that all tab-related data gets processed locally on your computer, ensuring your privacy and security are maintained.

The previous example is very interesting because you’re not telling Aria which particular tabs to close, but simply providing instructions to close tabs related to a specific topic. When you enter your command, the only thing that Aria gets is the prompt, and not any information about your tabs. 

So, Aria is interpreting your intention and generating a set of instructions – which are executed locally on your device – indicating which tabs to close based on your intention. Since the only information sent to the server is your prompt, Aria doesn’t know where you’ll be traveling next.

This feature represents how AI can be used on a day-to-day basis within your browser, without sacrificing any privacy, and it’s a first glimpse into the evolution of AI within the browser. 

If you’ve reached this part of the blog, congratulations! It means you’re a browser nerd like us. So I’ve got a treat for you, let’s delve a bit into the history of browser features to see how all of this comes together today.

20+ years of tab innovation

Tab Commands comes in as Opera’s latest innovation, and joins other features like Tab Islands, Page Context mode and Split-Screen – which were introduced throughout the past year and have improved the browser’s tabs and Command Line respectively. 

Opera’s history with tab innovations goes really far back. On June 28, 2000, Opera introduced what was then called a Tabbed Document Interface (TDI) – which effectively became the tabs you know and love today. This evolved into tabbed browsing and in browser window management as we know it today and has become  an indispensable tool for everybody. 

Since then, we’ve continued to launch plenty of new tab features. Why? Because we simply love tabs! Last year we released Tab Islands, and earlier this year we introduced tab Split-Screen with Opera One R2 in the Developer stream of the browser.

Fast forward to 2023, Opera became the first browser with natively integrated AI. And now, we’re taking our history a step further by integrating that good old feature – tabs – with the latest AI technology to help you navigate and manage countless tabs. The new Tab Commands feature represents a union of old and new, and highlights Opera’s spirit of innovation within the browser world.

Manage your tabs better with Opera’s Tab Commands

Tab Commands are now available in the Developer version of our Opera browser. Download it now to try out AI Tab Management, and keep an eye out for the AI Feature Drops that will come in the near future. 

Curious about what’s next? Scroll down and click the sign-up box to subscribe to our newsletter, and be among the first to find out what’s new in our AI Feature Drops program!

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*In some cases – and depending on your keyboard layout – the Aria Command Line can vary due to different positioning of the forward slash ( / ) character, for example, in the Nordics it is ctrl/cmd + shift + 7.

**This option is available when 5 or more tabs are open at the same time. 

AI Feature DropsAria AIOpera DeveloperTab CommandsTabs

---