Home > Lifestyle > Internet

Relax and Take a Break With Opera Air

By Crystal Crowder
Opera Air with break exercises.

Have you ever had a browser care about your mental health and wellbeing? Opera Air is changing that with a browser that encourages you to relax and take a break from trying to be a productivity powerhouse.

Opera Air Puts Mindfulness First

I’m used to seeing every new browser and browser update focus on productivity, and now AI. But Opera is taking a different approach. The new Opera Air is called a mindful browser and is yet another standalone browser for the company. There are already two successful Opera browsers: Opera One (productivity) and Opera GX (gaming). Some users prefer Opera over Chrome.

If you’re used to using either of Opera’s other browsers, Air could feel a bit minimal, but that’s the point. As the name implies, it’s all about taking a moment to just breathe in the air and relax, versus stressing about work, school, or whatever rabbit hole your search results are taking you down.

Currently, it’s the first mindfulness browser. Think of it as part standard browser and part meditation/mindfulness app. It includes a variety of calming features, such as:

  • Smart exercises that utilize your camera to guide you in real time
  • Guided meditations (only in English for now), which include multiple soothing voices
  • Mindfulness break reminders (customizable) to not lose track of time and forget to take a break
  • Boosts, which include a variety of binaural beats to aid in various scenarios, like creativity, relaxation, and even dream recall
  • Air UI, that auto-adapts to the wallpaper and theme you’re using
Choosing an adaptive wallpaper in Opera Air.

While this may sound more like a relaxation or meditation app than a browser, I understand your doubts. However, Opera didn’t replace the features we’ve all grown to love for mindfulness. Instead, the company created a perfect balance between relaxing and being productive.

Stays Minimalist and Productive

The entire design of Opera Air is purposely minimal so that your mind isn’t overwhelmed. But this is still a browser, and it boasts several useful productivity features, too, such as:

  • Ad-blocker
  • Free VPN (from personal experience, it is slow, but functional)
  • Aria AI (Opera’s AI), with no subscription necessary
  • Customizable sidebar
  • Keyboard shortcuts to access all your favorite features

Opera has listened to all the negative feedback from those who aren’t interested in AI and included a setting to turn Aria AI off – or even ChatGPT or ChatSonic.

However, the moment you start to feel stressed and overwhelmed by what you‘re reading, watching, or creating in your browser, take a step back and utilize the mindfulness tools right in the sidebar.

For instance, after a marathon research session, my brain may feel sluggish. The Energized Focus Boost helps re-energize me and keep me on track.

Using Energized Focus in Opera.

Right now, the biggest downside of Opera Air is that it’s only available for desktop, though a mobile app could be possible if the desktop launch is successful. In a world of increasingly cluttered browsers and apps, Opera’s being innovative and reminding everyone to create a better balance in their lives.

Please note that Opera Air isn’t a substitute for a mental health professional. It’s only a tool to aid in improving your mental health and reducing stress. Try these mental health apps to further take care of yourself. And, if you’re having trouble drifting off after staying up late scrolling on your phone, try these sleep apps.

Image credit: All screenshots by Crystal Crowder

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Crystal Crowder Avatar
Crystal Crowder
Crystal Crowder has spent over 15 years working in the tech industry, first as an IT technician and then as a writer. She works to help teach others how to get the most from their devices, systems, and apps. She stays on top of the latest trends and is always finding solutions to common tech problems.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.