Opera launches a mindfulness-focused browser with break reminders and soundscapes

Norway-based browser maker Opera on Tuesday launched a new browser called “Opera Air,” which focuses on mental well-being and mindfulness with features like break reminders, breathing exercises, soundscapes, and binaural beats for better focus.

The company said that people use browsers for a lot of their work online, and it wanted to ship a browser that is not just a utility tool but a stress and focus management system.

Opera opted for a new lightweight design language with semi-transparent theming.

In the floating sidebar, the company has placed a break reminder tool and a boosts feature — which plays a combination of music, ambient sounds, and binaural beats — along with shortcuts to the company’s Aria AI assistant, Messenger, and WhatsApp.

The “Take a break” feature acts like a battery indicator through three bars, and they become greyed out if you keep using the browser for a long period. You can define the time for continuous usage, after which the level of the indicator drops out, signaling you to take a break. You can also turn off this indicator system altogether.

For breaks, the company has designed different breathing exercises, neck stretches, meditation, or full body scans. You can do these activities depending on the length of the break you want to take and the mode of activity you want to choose.

For neck stretches, you can also choose to turn on your camera so the browser can guide you on your posture and form during the exercises.

Currently, Opear Air has only guided exercises for these breaks in English. But it is also working on voiceovers for other languages.

The other mindfulness feature, called Boosts, already comes with a pre-set combination of music, ambient sounds, and binaural beats. The company’s product director, Mohamed Salah, said that it chose to include binaural beats in these soundscapes as it helps improve focus by playing slightly different frequencies in each ear and, in effect, creating a new “ghost” frequency effect in the brain.

You can change the music, ambient sound, frequency of binaural beats, and volume of each track anytime. Users can also pick how long they want to play a boost ranging from 15 minutes to infinity. You can play or pause the boost from the sidebar at any point in time.

When TechCrunch asked Opera why it built a separate browser instead of baking these tools in the existing browser, Salah said the company wanted to bake in the concept of mindfulness in a different product.

“Opera One is a great browser that is aimed at productivity with features like split screen and tab islands. But what we want with Opera Air is to convey the concept of mindfulness with mindfulness tools and minimalistic design,” Salah said.

He also noted that while there are different apps for break reminders or soundscapes on Mac and on mobile, the company wanted to provide an all-in mindfulness package on desktop.

The challenge for Opera would be to have people adopt this version for mindfulness browsing. With its Opera One browser and gaming-focused Opera GX browser, the company has built up a suite of features people might be used to, and the transition to a minimalistic browser might not be easy.