What Is Perplexity Comet And How Does It Compare To Browsers Like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, And Edge?
Perplexity AI last week debuted Comet, a new web browser featuring AI-driven search functionalities.
Perplexity AI last week debuted Comet, a new web browser featuring artificial intelligence-driven search functionalities with the goal of supplanting conventional browsing with agentic AI that can reason, act, and make decisions.
Within a single, simple interface, and with less tabs, Comet allows users to search, query, perform tasks, and interact, with the aim of providing a more in-depth overview of user queries.
What Can Perplexity’s Comet Do?
As per Perplexity, Comet is capable of sending emails, booking a meeting, and performing tasks basis what a user sees. Comet can interact over highlighted words, text, and photos, and do everything from writing to summarising content to even organising your travel plans.
The browser is supported by a Comet Assistant, which can be spotted in the sidebar. The assistant is capable of comparing products, summarising information, and simplifying intricate workflows.
It can further enable users to review emails, manage calendar events, offer answers to queries about webpage content, and automatically buy things or fix appointments.
How Does Comet Compare To Chrome, Safari, Firefox, And Edge?
With Comet, Perplexity has joined the likes of OpenAI that are trying to replace conventional browsing via Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft Edge with AI-powered interfaces.
While dominant browsers like Chrome integrate AI features like Gemini, they primarily rely on search engines for information retrieval. On the other hand, Comet uses AI for search, aiming to offer more in-depth and contextually relevant results compared to traditional search engines.
Despite their dominance, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge are predominantly general-purpose browsers, while AI browsers like Comet are vying to be productivity-centric with features like summarisation, automation, and research.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has said that Comet is “designed to be a thought partner and assistant”, which signals that Perplexity is pitching it as more than just a search engine, but an advanced, research-centric, AI-assisted platform.
However, Comet currently comes with a fairly steep price tag of $200‑per‑month for Max subscribers. This could indeed make it difficult for Comet to compete with Google Chrome and other web browsers, which are free.
