Opera Mini, a barebones mobile browser that has millions of users across Africa, now has an in-built artificial intelligence tool called Aria which users can access at no additional cost.

In a statement on Wednesday, Opera Software said Aria’s capabilities include AI chat and search as well as AI image generation.

“AI is rapidly becoming an integral part of the daily internet experience, and we’re seeing great interest in AI solutions among South Africans, so bringing Aria to Opera Mini is a natural addition to our most downloaded browser,” said Jørgen Arnesen, executive vice president for mobile at Opera, in the statement.

The company said Aria will be accessible free of charge through its browser. The cost of accessing the internet has been a focus for the company for many years, which Opera described as “unproportionately high” compared to other countries with a similar income-to-GDP ratio.

Opera Mini’s data-saving mode can reduce data usage by up to 90% compared to other popular browsers, Opera Software has claimed. “For the past three years, Opera has saved South Africans over six million gigabytes, equivalent to US$10-million (R188-million), in data through its data compression technology,” it said.

Another of Opera Mini’s data-savings initiatives takes the form of free data campaigns that it has run in partnership with MTN since 2022. Through the campaigns, Opera Mini users on MTN enjoy 3GB of free data per month.

The battle for AI supremacy in the browser market has seen players in both the desktop and mobile space upping their game in the hope that integrating the best AI tools will help grow their market share.

Optimised

Microsoft Edge’s Copilot is a prominent frontrunner in AI integration, but Google soon followed with Gemini integration in Chrome. Mozilla has also injected nore than $65-million into AI development and boasts a browser integrated with AI chatbot, translation, shopping assistant, image captioning and e-mail summarising capabilities.

According to research by web traffic analysis website StatCounter, Opera Mini has just under 2% of the mobile browser market as of March 2025. Opera Mini said it has more than 100 million users worldwide, many of them in emerging markets.

Chrome dominates the mobile market at 67% total share, with Apple’s Safari second largest at 23%. The desktop market has a similar profile, except that Edge and Firefox feature instead as the third and fourth most popular browsers instead of Samsung Internet and Opera Mini.

Read: Rivals bristle over Chrome’s browser dominance

“Aria is optimised for minimal data consumption and is included within Opera’s free daily data bundles in South Africa, making it an ideal solution for the 69% of South Africans who would use AI tools only if they didn’t add to data usage,” said Opera. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media

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