Is your browser working for you as much as it should? For decades, our web browsing experience has remained fundamentally unchanged. Sure, browsers have gotten faster and more capable with dynamic content and extensions, but the core experience is still largely user-driven. We manually click links, type search queries, and navigate through multi-step processes on websites. In other words, the browser just sits there waiting for us to do things. After many years as a developer, I’ve seen tech hype come and go, so I was skeptical at first – but the recent push toward agent-driven (or “agentic”) browsing feels different. It targets a real pain point: the mind-numbing, time-consuming tasks we perform on the web every day. Imagine a browser that doesn’t just passively display pages, but actually helps you get things done by taking action on your behalf.
Why Browsing Needs a Change
Think about a common online chore, like doing your weekly grocery shopping (setting aside those futuristic smart fridges that can auto-order for you). The process probably goes something like this:
- Log in to your preferred grocery website.
- Search for each item on your list (milk, eggs, chicken, vegetables…).
- Add items to your cart one by one.
- Go to the checkout page once you have everything.
- Pick a delivery slot that fits your schedule.
- Enter payment info and confirm the order.
That’s easily a 5-10 minute ordeal of repetitive clicking and form-filling, even if you know exactly what you need. Now imagine all of the above could happen in under a minute with a single prompt: “Buy my regular weekly groceries, plus the ingredients for chicken chow mein, and schedule delivery on Tuesday evening after work.” You hit enter, sit back, and your browser takes care of the rest – logging in, searching and selecting the right items, handling the checkout and scheduling. This is exactly the kind of use-case the new wave of agentic browsers are aiming to enable. For example, Google DeepMind’s prototype Project Mariner has demonstrated that users will be able to simply ask for something like buying groceries or booking tickets, and the AI agent will visit websites and complete those tasks for them without the user manually navigating any pages. In a demo at Google I/O 2025, Google showed their search AI handling a full ticket purchase: you could ask for “find 2 affordable tickets for the Reds game on Saturday in the lower level,” and the AI will scour ticket sites, compare options, and even fill in the tedious checkout forms for you. In the end, it presents you the best options, ready for one-click purchase on your preferred site. You stay in control, but all the heavy lifting of searching, comparing, and form-filling is offloaded to the agent. This is a huge paradigm shift from how we normally use browsers.
Why is this a big deal? Because our time online is full of multi-step tasks like the grocery scenario – booking flights, making restaurant reservations, buying items across multiple sites, filling out government forms, and so on. Currently, you have to handle each step manually, which is not only time-consuming but also mentally draining. An agent-driven browsing experience promises to streamline these workflows. Instead of you doing the boring procedural work, you merely state your goal, and the browser’s AI will figure out the procedure. In essence, the browser becomes an intelligent assistant rather than a dumb window to the internet. Such an AI-enhanced browser can summarize content for you, automate website interactions, and guide you through complex processes, acting much more like a personal helper than a traditional browser tab.
What Is Agentic Browsing, Exactly?
“Agentic browsing” is a bit of a buzzword, but it boils down to a simple idea: giving your browser a degree of agency to act on your behalf. In practical terms, this means an AI inside the browser can understand your commands (in natural language) and then execute actions within the browser just like a human user would. Rather than just returning search results, it can click links, fill text fields, press buttons – whatever steps are needed to accomplish your request.
In other words, your browser can drive itself under the direction of an AI co-pilot.
With an agentic browser, sometimes you’ll still drive, but other times you can just tell the browser what you want to happen and let it navigate for you.
Perplexity’s Comet – A Browser that Takes Action
One of the most buzzed-about entrants in this field is Comet, the new AI-powered browser from Perplexity. With Comet Perplexity have taken a bold leap into building a whole browser around that concept. Built on Chromium, Comet has been described as “the first truly agentic browser to release,” with an AI assistant at its core. Unlike traditional browsers, Comet isn’t just about rendering web pages faster or integrating a few AI plugins – it was designed from the ground up with agentic capabilities in mind.
Despite being in a beta state for months now I still on the waiting list but may bite the bullet and pay for the $200 Max-tier subscription.
Other Players: Edge’s Copilot, Dia, and Google’s Mariner
Perplexity isn’t the only one trying to make agentic browsing a reality. The big browser makers and several startups have all smelled the coffee – they see this could be the next paradigm of user experience. Here’s a quick tour of what others are doing in this space:
- Browser Company’s Dia: The Browser Company (the team behind the Arc browser, which has gained a cult following for its fresh take on browser UI) is also experimenting with an AI-driven browser called Dia. Dia is essentially Arc + AI assistant. Like Comet, it’s built atop Chromium and currently in an invite-only beta.
- Google’s Project Mariner and Chrome: It’s no surprise that Google – the king of search and the maker of Chrome – is deeply interested in agentic browsing. Google actually coined the term “AI Mode” for a new mode of Google Search that incorporates these agentic capabilities. As mentioned earlier, their Project Mariner is a research prototype (from Google DeepMind) that can autonomously use the Chrome browser to complete tasks for you.
- Microsoft Edge & Copilot: Microsoft has been quick to infuse AI into its Edge browser. Earlier in 2023 they added the Bing Chat sidebar (dubbed “Copilot”), which could summarize pages or help compose emails. That was a nice feature, but relatively speaking it was just a sidebar helper – the core browsing stayed the same. Now, Microsoft is taking it much further. In mid-2025, they announced a full “Copilot Mode” for Edge that aims to turn it into an “AI-first” browser. This mode (currently experimental) transforms Edge’s interface and functionality around the AI.
In summary, many players large and small are racing to add agentic capabilities to browsers. Each has a slightly different flavor – some focus on voice control and productivity (Edge Copilot), some on integrated search and action (Comet, Google), others on privacy or specific use-cases – but the common theme is unmistakable. We’re witnessing the beginning of a new era of “AI browsers” or “browser copilots” that could fundamentally change our relationship with the web.
A New Way to Surf – My Take on “Vibe Browsing”
From my perspective, this is a natural next step in our ever-more-efficient interaction with technology. It doesn’t mean every single web search or casual browsing session needs an AI agent running. There are plenty of times when it’s faster or preferable to scroll and click yourself, especially for quick info or leisure reading. However, for those tedious, multi-step web tasks that we’d love to offload (the “I know what I want, I just don’t want to go through all the motions” scenarios), having an agent in the background is a game-changer. It can turn 30 minutes of form-filling or comparison shopping into a 30-second request. It can also make the web more accessible to those who aren’t as tech-savvy – people who might struggle with complex online procedures could simply describe what they need and let the agent handle the navigation. There’s a productivity benefit and an accessibility benefit rolled into one.
In conclusion, agent-driven browsing has the potential to make our online lives easier and more efficient by cutting out the drudgery. It’s still early days – very much a work in progress – but the momentum is there. Nearly every major tech player is investing in this concept, and some early products like Comet are already showing how transformative it can be.
Watch this space, because the way we surf the web might be about to change forever
Techie Ranch 
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