So Perplexity shipped Comet this week. If you haven't seen it yet, it's their new web browser, built on Chromium, and the pitch isn't "faster tabs" or "better bookmarks," it's that the browser itself can just do things for you. You tell it to compare flight prices, or clean out your inbox, or check out with a cart you built somewhere, and it drives the page like a person would, clicking and scrolling and filling in fields, while you sit back and watch a little sidebar narrate what it's doing.
Right now it's invite-only and tied to Perplexity Max, which is the $200-a-month tier, so most of us are on a waitlist rather than actually using it. I put my email in Tuesday night and haven't heard anything back yet, which feels about right for launch week.
I've got mixed feelings on this and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
On one level, I get it completely. So much of what I do in a browser is genuinely dumb, repetitive labor. Open seven tabs to compare the same product on three sites, copy a tracking number into a different tab, paste an address into a form I've pasted it into four hundred times before. If something can just do that reliably while I go make coffee, sign me up. That part of the pitch is honestly not that far off from what a lot of us already do manually with a chatbot open in a side window, except Comet is supposedly skipping the copy-paste step entirely and acting directly on the page.
But the whole idea also makes me a little uneasy in a way I can't fully justify with logic. Handing an AI agent your actual browser session, cookies and logins and all, so it can go click "buy" on things, is a pretty big trust leap. Perplexity says it asks for confirmation before anything with money attached. Fine. I still don't love the idea of software driving my mouse through my Amazon account while I'm not looking at the screen. Maybe that's an old-man reaction and in five years I'll laugh at myself for typing it. Maybe not.
The other thing I keep thinking about is how crowded this space has suddenly gotten. The Browser Company killed off Arc earlier this year to go all-in on Dia, which is their own AI-first browser, and now here's Perplexity doing something adjacent but more agentic, less "chat about the page" and more "handle the page." Add in whatever Google's quietly baking into Chrome and it really does feel like everybody decided at once that 2025 is the year the browser gets reinvented, again, for the third or fourth time since I started this blog back in 2011. I've watched enough "this changes browsing forever" launches by now to have a healthy amount of patience about it. Rockmelt, remember Rockmelt? Nobody does. That's kind of my point.
What actually makes Comet interesting to me isn't the shopping-agent demo everyone's screenshotting, it's the more boring stuff, like asking it to summarize a long thread of email and draft three different replies without me opening a single message. That's the kind of task I'd trust an agent with today, low stakes, easily checked, mostly just saving me typing. Letting it independently navigate a checkout flow on a site I've never used before is a different level of trust and I'm not there yet, even if the tech works exactly as advertised.
I'll try to get an invite over the next week or two and actually put it through its paces rather than going off a demo video, because demo videos for this category of product have a bad track record of looking way smoother than the real thing. If it can reliably book me a restaurant reservation without me babysitting every step, that's genuinely useful and I'll say so. If it fumbles halfway through and leaves some form half-filled on a page I now have to go clean up myself, that's just a slower, more expensive way of doing the thing I was already doing.
Either way it's a strange week to be paying attention to browsers, and an even stranger one to be paying attention to what AI companies are shipping in general, but that's sort of become the baseline now, hasn't it.