An web browser with built-in mindfulness and meditation instruments? Sounds just a little like buzzword fodder to me. Nevertheless, I am a drained, jaded journalist who’ll attempt something to really feel extra alive, so I examined the early entry launch, mindfulness-focused Opera Air and located its options simple and genuinely useful within the quick interval I performed round with it.
Constructed by Norwegian browser maker Opera, Opera Air claims to be “the first browser built around the concept of mindfulness.” Opera has launched thematic variations of its personal browsers previously, together with a gaming-focused browser with a “Panic Button,” and a crypto browser. The newest, Air, is designed as a browser that each capabilities like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari but in addition “helps its users manage stress, enhance their focus, and maintain emotional clarity throughout their day.”
Tech platforms, apps, and wearables geared toward boosting mindfulness have made corporations and startups a mint for years, so it is comprehensible why eyebrows disappear into hairlines when a shiny new one comes alongside. Nevertheless, the web is a really shitty place of late, a veritable tidal wave of misinformation and tech bros getting wealthy off unbridled abuse and harassment. We’re all on it, day after day, so a browser pinging me to “Take a Break” on the common does not seem to be the worst factor on this planet. So I attempted it out.
Opera Air is immediately recognizable as a contemporary mindfulness providing
Once you first set up Opera Air, you may meet the requisite verdant panorama of rolling hills and a lone hiker, overlaid with an inspirational Jon Kabat-Zinn quote: “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” Drenched in that overt earnestness, let’s have a look round. You may select a unique wallpaper from mountaintop clouds, a meditation rock in a forest, or the corporate’s signature bubble overlaid on some naturescapes.
Mountains, verify. Inspirational quote, verify.
Credit score: Opera Air / Mashable screenshot
You may join Opera Air along with your Chrome or Firefox account, which can usher in all of your bookmarks, or you can begin recent. On the homepage, Opera Air options default buttons for main mindfulness apps together with Headspace and Calm, skilled artistic database Behance, social publishing platforms Medium and Penzu, and mindfulness writer Conscious.
Mashable requested Opera about whether or not these buttons have been sponsored placements, and the corporate stated they weren’t: “Currently, we do not have any partnerships or affiliations with other apps or sites. This is a selection of inspiring apps and websites that our users can find helpful. Of course they have full control to remove these sites if they don’t want them and wish to have a more minimalist experience.”
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Testing the “Take a Break” and “Boosts” options
Most likely probably the most overt mindfulness plug-in right here is the “Take a Break” button on the left hand menu. Urgent the icon that appears like three horizontal dashes will convey up a menu of choices: respiration and neck workout routines (3D-camera enabled or not), and guided meditations together with a full physique scan. You may actively search the characteristic out or set your timer to allow break reminders for as usually as you want (60 minutes appears to be a great ballpark quantity).
The “Take a Break” menu.
Credit score: Opera Air / Mashable screenshot
Opera informed Mashable the corporate produced the workout routines in-house and the sounds by an company, all utilizing licensed lo-fi music tracks and ambient sounds — you may change up the ambient sound when you desire “vinyl record crackling” to “walking in mid shallow water” (I do). You may select between voice guides (Emma or Alex, each voice actors) and Opera informed Mashable they’re out there in English for now, with Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, and German deliberate to roll out quickly.
These kinds of meditation can be found on many mindfulness and meditation apps, a few of which value cash and a few which don’t, so that is nothing new. But it surely’s free (for now, and bear in mind the cardinal rule of apps and software program: if it’s free, you are in all probability the product). Conveniently, nonetheless, it’s proper there in your browser, so when you’re like me, doing a small meditation earlier than heading right into a video name assembly could be extra possible for you than pulling out your cellphone.
I attempted a seven-minute mindfulness meditation to “enhance focus, floor the thoughts, and scale back stress.” The meditation uses techniques like controlled breathing, identifying thoughts and emotions and letting them pass by without judgment, checking in with your posture, noticing the space around you, and other long-used hallmarks of the practice. And yeah, I felt focused afterward, and could potentially use this every day to make a real effort to make meditation a behavior.
The “Boosts” are binaural beats.
Credit score: Opera Air / Mashable screenshot
The opposite mindfulness software Open Air options is “Boosts,” sitting above the “Take a Break” option in the left menu. It’s a menu of binaural beats, a long prevalent auditory technique that generates a unique frequency in the brain when you listen to two different frequencies at once — Opera told Mashable the platform uses pure sine waves and carrier frequencies of 120hz and 240hz to deliver a range of binaural beats between 1hz and 40hz. There are different frequency states, several of which help with focus and attention, some which are associated more with relaxation; Opera Air’s binaural beats offerings are titled Creativity Boost, Energized Focus, Deep Relaxation and more.
Other bits in Opera Air that aren’t mindfulness-related
Like its standard Opera browsers, Opera Air also features the company’s ad blocker and Opera’s own free VPN, which you can switch on and off in the Settings. Here, you can also take control of your privacy and data settings.
On the sidebar, there’s also an inbuilt AI chatbot called Aria that’s been built using a combination of AI models GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5, and Imagen 3. Meta platforms WhatsApp and Messenger are also built into this menu, which feels weird to see underneath the mindfulness tools, but hey, this is a browser after all. Plus, you can switch these on or off in the Settings.
As I said, in 2025, with everything simmering online, an internet browser with an in-built mindfulness reminder seems like a pretty good idea. There’s plenty of online spaces to get free meditation and mindfulness steering proper now, and that is one among them, one which’s shut at hand throughout your work day.
