- Perplexity’s new Comet browser guarantees an AI assistant that travels the net for you
- Comet joins different AI browsers aiming to beat Chrome
- Though AI firms are betting on their browsers’ means to entice customers, their mainstream enchantment stays unsure
Perplexity has made its AI-powered Comet browser free worldwide, not reserving it for these prepared to spend $200 a month for a Perplexity Max subscription.
It is a massive transfer, and one which Perplexity claims won’t ever change. However whether or not making Comet free will make it fashionable stays an open query, at the same time as AI‑pushed browsers proliferate.
Comet is a Chromium‑based browser that embeds Perplexity’s AI throughout. The initial homepage is a chat with the AI. You can open the Comet Assistant as a side panel from every website.
It watches what you’re doing and offers help with whatever task you’re engaged in, from summarizing big chunks of text to making grocery lists on shopping platforms and even going through your own data (with your permission) to pull answers from your email, calendar, and more. If you like using AI tools regularly, there’s an obvious advantage in not having to switch windows or paste URLs each time you want to engage with an AI assistant.
Although Comet and its main features are free, some more advanced tools are only available to Comet Plus and Max subscribers. For instance, Comet Plus bundles curated journalism from major publishers, while Max subscribers can get Comet to run its AI tools for hours at a time with the Background Assistant feature.
By making Comet free for most things, Perplexity clearly hopes to capture people’s browsing time, not just search queries. After all, if your AI browser is always there, it becomes the default mode. You might stop searching websites or switching tabs; you’ll talk to your side panel instead. Perplexity is also working to push Comet onto phones.
It needs every edge it can get as it faces AI integration by Google and Microsoft of their respective browsers, in addition to newcomers like Opera’s new Neon AI browser, which options subscription pricing.
Perplexity probably hopes Comet shall be a brand new (extra profitable) Netscape when it comes to shifting how individuals browse on-line. Satirically, it does so by bringing again a extra subtle model of the walled backyard method acquainted to these of us who as soon as remembered AOL key phrases quite than URLs. The assistant might prevent effort and time trawling the net for data, however you’d should belief it is doing it a minimum of in addition to you’d.
AI browsing future
My own experiments with it went remarkably well. I connected the browser to my Google account and asked it to create a calendar of upcoming events based on a search for invitations and related terms. A couple of minutes later, I had my next two months in place, and the AI had follow-up suggestions to fill in the gaps.
Next, I tested its connection with other apps and asked for a recipe for Ceaser salad, and to put the ingredients into a shopping cart for a grocery store near me. Comet didn’t fully auto-checkout, but it opened the ordering page, filled in my email and address, selected the items from a linked recipe, and queued the order for confirmation.
Finally, I semi-randomly came across a complicated scientific paper about neural decoding in rodents and opened it in a tab, then asked Comet Assistant to create a couple of charts based on the experiments. It parsed the PDF, extracted the underlying data where available or interpolated it from the text, and presented the charts, along with a clear annotation of their meaning.
Those three tasks – ordering food, scheduling from emails, and charting data – felt like glimpses of how AI browsing can shift from passive viewing to active doing. The conversational flow, combined with page-aware context, made them smoother than toggling between search, email, calendar, and spreadsheets.
Of course, it wasn’t perfect; there was some lag, and a couple of times, I had to further explain myself, but overall, it was a very impressive result.
At the same time, I was keenly aware that the AI integration meant it could see more of my browsing, which raised some discomfort around privacy. Still, if Comet in its free form proves stable and reliable, Perplexity may succeed in redefining what a browser should do. We may find ourselves expecting not just to surf, but to converse with the web.
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