Oslo, Norway – 14 November 2025 – Norwegian browser company Opera [NASDAQ: OPRA] has teamed up with Spotify, the world’s largest audio streaming subscription service, to create a browser theme that dances along to your music.
Available from today in Opera One, Opera’s flagship desktop browser, the Sonic Theme uses shader technology to create a unique audiovisual experience when users listen to Spotify through the browser’s Music Player.
“People love listening to music while browsing, and Opera is still the only major web browser with a built-in Music Player that makes for a truly great experience,” said Mohamed Salah Mourad, Senior Director of Product at Opera. “Now we’re taking it one step further with a visual theme of the browser reacting to your music.”
Introducing Sonic
To activate Sonic, select the theme from Opera’s theme gallery. Sonic will then appear as an animation on Opera’s Start page that reacts to a user’s music, resembling the effect that sound waves have on a thin layer of sand. The theme truly comes alive when you start playing your favorite music from the Music Player in the sidebar – then you will see how the animation turns into fine particles that dance across the screen.
While Sonic is available exclusively in dark mode, users can customize its animations with different colors. They can appear vivid and colorful for 80s pop classics, for example, or a more monochromatic collection of grays for a new wave playlist.
“The Sonic theme is our third major improvement to Opera One to make a better music streaming experience,” continued Salah. “With the sidebar integration of popular music services, a floating music Music Player, and now a visual theme, we believe we have truly elevated what the music streaming experience could be like in Opera.”
Building on the best of Opera One
Opera’s flagship desktop browser Opera One comes with a Music Player that can be detached and moved around the screen at will, putting users in full control of their music without interrupting their browsing. Spotify is set as the Music Player’s default streaming service, with Opera users in select countries offered the chance to try out Spotify Premium for free for a limited time.*
Opera One also comes with Dynamic Themes, which use animated backgrounds, UI colors, browser sounds, and more to let users customize the look and feel of their browser. Far more than just a change to the UI colors or a new background image, Dynamic Themes use shader technology to calculate the color of each pixel in your screen, letting users play with endless combinations. Today’s release puts both of these technologies to use to make Sonic come to life.
Sonic in detail
All of Opera’s Dynamic Themes use shaders that employ the WebGPU standard to create an animation that runs in the background of the browser without impacting the system’s resource consumption significantly. Sonic takes that level of technical innovation to a new level.
With the Sonic Theme, the browser captures audio from the sidebar and converts it into a power spectrum texture, where one axis represents frequency and the other represents time. This texture is passed to the shader, where each pixel samples the current audio intensity using its screen position and animation-driven coordinates.The shader applies a frequency compensation curve to balance the spectrum and outputs an amplitude value that drives animation, color, and other visual effects in sync with the music. The upshot is an audiovisual experience completely unique to what a user is listening to.
The Sonic Theme is active only when a user is on the Start page of the browser, and like the Music Player, will pause when the user starts a call or a video. This ensures that the browser does not use additional system resources in the background when users are otherwise occupied.
As part of the partnership between Spotify and Opera, Opera users in selected countries* are getting a chance to benefit from Spotify Premium for free for a limited period of time. The specifics of the offer vary by country.
See why Opera One is the only browser truly optimized for listening to music – download Opera and see how Sonic dances along to your music.
*Opera users in selected countries will be offered an opportunity to upgrade to Spotify Premium if they are not subscribers already. Users in Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Poland, and Spain will be offered Spotify Premium for 3 months. Users in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States will also be offered 3 months free, while users who previously paid for Spotify Premium in those countries – but canceled it more than 30 days ago – will be offered 2 months free. Users in India will be offered 2 months free. Users in Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam will be offered the opportunity to pay for 1 month of Spotify Premium to get 3 months free. Users in Turkey will be offered 3 months of Spotify Premium for 99 TRY. This offer is available in the Music Player of the Opera One R2 sidebar.
About Opera
Opera is a user-centric and innovative software company focused on enabling the best possible internet browsing experience across all devices. Hundreds of millions use Opera web browsers for their unique and secure features on mobile phones and desktop computers. Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Oslo, Norway, Opera is a public company listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol OPRA. Download the Opera web browsers and other Opera products from opera.com. Learn more about Opera at investor.opera.com.