(Credit: PCMag Composite; Perplexity)
AI is everywhere now—including web browsers. At the moment, though, most people don’t use AI browsers, opting instead for the usual suspects, such as Chrome, Edge, or Firefox. As an expert artificial intelligence writer, however, I wanted to find out if AI browsers are a real leap forward or just gimmicky reskins of existing apps. So, I set aside Chrome for a week and used Perplexity’s AI Comet browser exclusively.
What's my takeaway? Comet works just as well as any other browser for surfing the web, and some of its AI tech is genuinely cool, like an assistant that can compare and summarize multiple tabs with ease, and shortcuts you can make to streamline anything you do within a browser. Comet definitely has room for improvement, though, and so far, I haven't been able to truly take advantage of it in a way that changes how I browse the web. Still, it might just click for you.
What Is Comet, and What Can It Do?
Comet is Perplexity’s take on a web browser, marrying Chromium’s familiar interface and underlying design with Perplexity’s AI tech. If you aren’t familiar, Chromium is an open-source web browser project, which Google largely develops and maintains, but that is distinct from Chrome. Most modern browsers rely on Chromium tech, including Chrome, Edge, and Opera. This shared foundation means that Comet is compatible with the vast majority of websites you will encounter, just like other mainstream browsers. Standard features, such as an incognito mode, are available, too.
A Chromium base also means that swapping to Comet from Chrome is incredibly seamless: In just a couple of clicks, you can transfer all your bookmarks and extensions. I came from Chrome with dozens of bookmarks and a good deal of extensions, but setting up a profile and transferring everything over took just a minute or two.
Comet has several unique features, chief among them a powerful AI assistant you can access at any time. It's a chatbot that lives inside your web browser and can access the pages you open. Unsurprisingly, Comet uses Perplexity as its default home page and search engine.
To access the Comet AI browser, you currently need an invitation or a Perplexity Max subscription ($200 per month). Free and wider access will surely come in the future. For now, Comet works on macOS and Windows, but Perplexity says support for more platforms is on the way.
What I Like About Comet
I appreciate Comet’s user interface, which is sleeker and slightly blockier than Chrome. It looks a lot better than Chrome in dark mode, too. I also prefer how Comet’s AI assistant opens up in a sidebar: In Chrome, Gemini pops out in a separate window. And although widgets aren't always the most useful, I’m a fan of them. Perplexity’s default home page has a variety of widgets, such as a clock, notes, weather, and more. You can add, rearrange, and remove them at will, though only nine are currently available.
(Credit: Perplexity/PCMag)Comet’s AI assistant can be incredibly useful. For example, I can ask it to compare various tabs when I’m evaluating different builds for a video game character. It can also summarize pages with the click of a button. This comes in handy when I'm reading through Reddit posts or am trying to troubleshoot something. As a writer, it’s convenient to be able to check in with the assistant for feedback on clarity, conciseness, phrasing, and word choice, too, which is beyond what many free spell-checker extensions can do.
Using Perplexity as Comet’s default search engine, it’s nice to be able to type actual questions into my search bar. Like other chatbots, Perplexity is generally competent at answering questions and searching the web, so I don’t need to rely on keywords and scroll through a list of Google results. Naturally, I can also just open up the AI assistant and ask it questions, too, which is useful if I’m already interacting with it and want to save a few clicks.
You can also automate Comet's AI functionally by way of shortcuts, which are essentially commands. These can be questions you want to ask regularly, such as updated information on job listings, or actions, like comparing two tabs or extracting recipe information from a web page. You choose the underlying Perplexity model the shortcuts should use, decide what sources of information they should access, and describe exactly how they should work. It's a cool feature, but it's just a time-saver, since shortcuts are prewritten prompts, not any genuinely new functionality. The shortcuts are also only as good as Comet's browser piloting ability (more on that later) and the underlying models.
I appreciate how Comet stores the variety of information it collects locally on my system. In the order they're listed, Comet collects the following: interaction data (like browsing history), technical data, extension data, settings data, and communication data. If Perplexity is going to collect my data anyway, I prefer it to live on my device rather than a third-party server.
I ran Comet and Chrome through the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cover Your Tracks project, which determines how well a browser protects you against fingerprinting and tracking. The test reported 18.12 bits of identifying information for both those browsers, so Comet is no worse than Chrome in this respect.
What I Don’t Like About Comet
Although I like Comet’s local processing from a privacy perspective, I'm not a fan of how the browser uses your interaction data to “improve [itself] and recommend relevant content” by default. Furthermore, the browser's reliance on your device for data processing means it pushes CPU utilization and memory usage fairly high. I noticed CPU utilization rise to 20% at times and memory usage (across just a couple of tabs) balloon to over 4GB when using AI features. However, both Comet and Chrome take up about the same resources during typical web browsing.
On a similar note, using Perplexity as my default search engine isn’t always convenient. Yes, it's helpful when I want to ask a question. But if I want to do a quick search for a keyword, Perplexity doesn’t give me the link I expect in its top results as often as Google does. You can change your default search engine to Google, or force Comet to search Google, instead of Perplexity, by prefacing searches with "!g" before your query, but I still wish Perplexity itself were a little more adept at traditional search.
If you’re familiar with ChatGPT’s Agent feature, Edge’s Copilot Mode, or Google’s Project Mariner, Comet has similar functionality: It can pilot your web browser and do tasks for you. This means, for example, that you can open Gmail and tell Comet to clear out your spam folder. Or you can tell Comet to find a delicious oyakodon recipe and add its ingredients to your Instacart.
In my testing, Comet could clear out spam, but it struggled to add things to a cart. Much like with Project Mariner, Comet’s ability to actually do stuff for you like an assistant is limited. Expect Comet to regularly get stuck or fail. And when it works, it’s usually slower than doing something yourself. Accordingly, I didn’t like or use this feature much, even if it’s cool on a conceptual level. Of course, it's likely to improve over time.
Lastly, Comet’s voice chat mode disappoints. Admittedly, I prefer to interact with chatbots over text, but Comet’s voice mode feels surprisingly limited. It has a fairly lifelike voice, and you don’t need to press enter after speaking, but you get a less powerful assistant when voice chatting than you do when text chatting. For example, I can open the sidebar and ask the assistant to suggest edits to my writing, but if I engage voice mode and ask the same thing, Comet tells me it doesn’t have access to the page.
Should You Switch to Comet?
Assuming you can get access to it, there are good reasons to consider making it your primary browser. It avoids bloat, makes the transition from Chrome easy, and provides generally useful AI functionality. Depending on how you browse the web, Comet's AI assistant and shortcuts might be must-have features.
De-Googling my life sounds great, so moving away from Chrome to something similar has some appeal. However, I haven't found anything I can create a shortcut for within Comet that truly revolutionizes my web browsing experience. And most of my chatbot usage comes down to occasionally prompting a bot with a question, which I can do with ChatGPT or Gemini about as well as I can with Comet. So, Comet is enough for me to keep in my browser rotation for a while, but I’m not convinced I’ll stick with it for the long haul.
On the one hand, Chrome gets worse over time, delisting popular extensions (such as uBlock Origin) from its web store and turning into even more of a privacy nightmare with its Gemini integration. Comet, on the other hand, is a new browser, and so it’s entirely possible, if not inevitable, that it will improve in the near future, refining its AI technology so that its assistant is more capable and less demanding on computer resources. Yes, it still has all the downsides of any Chromium browser (including the inability to install uBlock Origin), but I plan to keep my eye on Comet nonetheless.