- Perplexity’s new Comet browser promises an AI assistant that travels the web for you
- Comet joins other AI browsers aiming to beat Chrome
- Although AI companies are betting on their browsers’ ability to entice users, their mainstream appeal remains uncertain
Perplexity has made its AI-powered Comet browser free worldwide, no longer reserving it for those willing to spend $200 a month for a Perplexity Max subscription.
It’s a big move, and one that Perplexity claims will never change. But whether making Comet free will make it popular remains an open question, even as AI‑driven 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 in their respective browsers, as well as newcomers like Opera’s new Neon AI browser, which features subscription pricing.
Perplexity likely hopes Comet will be a new (more successful) Netscape in terms of shifting how people browse online. Ironically, it does so by bringing back a more sophisticated version of the walled garden approach familiar to those of us who once remembered AOL keywords rather than URLs. The assistant could save you time and effort trawling the web for information, but you’d have to trust it’s doing it at least as well as you would.
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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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
