After waiting months and paying premium early access fees, in Augst I finally got my hands on Perplexity Comet. Was it worth the investment? Here’s my honest take after putting it through its paces.
First Impressions: Familiar Yet Different
Opening Comet for the first time felt oddly familiar—the interface reminded me of Safari, clean and minimal. Right away, it prompted me to import bookmarks, extensions, and authentication from Chrome. I’ll admit, I hesitated. Coming in with an evaluator’s mindset, handing over that level of access right away felt like a big ask. But to truly test Comet’s capabilities, I took the leap into the unknown.
The interface itself is simple, with conversational AI baked directly into the browser experience rather than bolted on as an afterthought.
The Features That Actually Impressed Me
Comet brings several genuinely useful capabilities to the table:
Content Intelligence: Generate article summaries, describe images, and—my personal favourite—get comprehensive YouTube video summaries with key takeaways, similar video suggestions, and even fact-checking. As someone who’s wasted countless hours on clickbait videos, this feature alone has saved me significant time.
Cross Tab Awareness: Comet can was able to scan all my open tabs, summarise their contents, and even compare content across them. For those who love to keep all tabs open since the beginning of time this will be a God send.
Email Management: After linking my Gmail account (more on this decision later), Comet identified upcoming deadlines from my calendar and emails. The speed was impressive; it must have leveraged some serious caching in the background. I was able to ask for potential marketing email that I should unsubscribe from, a small but meaningful quality-of-life improvement, thou I actually didn’t hit the go button in the end; just in case; the human in me came out.
Developer-Friendly Feedback: I wanted to check out the website optimisation analysis on some sites that I had built in the past, Comet provided surprisingly actionable feedback on improving page performance. This could be genuinely valuable for other developers but it could also mean that I was pretty bad at website optimisation .
The Trust Tax: What You’re Really Paying
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: to make Comet truly useful, you have to surrender a significant amount of control very early on.
Granting access to my personal Gmail account meant Comet could read through all my emails and calendar entries. Hence the question you have to ask yourself: am I comfortable with that trade-off?
For me, the deliberation wasn’t trivial; maybe it’s an age thing. This isn’t just about privacy policies—it’s about fundamentally changing my relationship with my browser experience from tool to trusted assistant.
True Agentic Browsing: The Real Innovation
While cross-tab summaries aren’t unique to Comet (Arc+AI and Dia offer similar features), Comet takes a significant leap forward with autonomous web navigation. The team calls this “Agentic Browsing”—and they’re right to emphasise it.
This wasn’t just summarizing what’s already on the screen. It was daunting to see Comet navigate the web on my behalf, clicking through pages, filling forms, and completing multi-step processes. It’s the difference between a research assistant who reads your documents and one who actually goes out and finds new information.
Where Comet Falls Short
Command Chaining: At least for me I couldn’t determine whether Comet can handle complex command chains like: “Check for product X Amazon, then email me other websites with the same product, then add a reminder in my calendar to review these products.” This feels like table stakes for true agentic behaviour.
Voice Assistant: Let’s just say it’s… adequate. Neither impressive nor terrible—just there; never really had a solid use case for this but I can see where this could be useful in future.
Specific Task Failures: When I asked it to find the top-rated comment on a YouTube channel, it failed completely, went into an ever ending doom loop.
Differentiation Questions: I kept asking myself: what can Comet do that I couldn’t accomplish directly with Perplexity’s main product or OpenAI’s Operator? Honestly, most tasks could be done elsewhere. BUT Comet does remove friction by integrating everything directly into the browser. That integration matters more than I initially expected the more that I used it.
The Bigger Picture: Where This Is All Heading
The real question isn’t whether Comet is perfect today—it’s whether agentic browsing represents the future of how we interact with the web.
The Trust Problem: For me at the start handing control to an AI browser, even momentarily, feels unnerving. For exploration it was fine but when the decision came to actually act upon the final step in the workflow then I hesitate. What I’d love to see a developer tools panel that provides transparency into the agent’s decision-making process—showing each step it’s taking and reasoning as to why it came to such conclusion.
General Ecosystem Challenge: As agents begin operating at scale, websites will need to adapt. Some sites already block automated LLM scraping and bots & rightfully so; who would want to give all it’s content away for OpenAI, Anthropic or Google a like to take credit for it. We might even see a resurgence of CAPTCHA-like challenges to verify human presence.
The other wise of the coin is, if agentic browsing drives genuine traffic and sales (even if accomplished by AI on a human’s behalf), websites will have real incentives to cooperate. Just look at Google partnership with services like Ticketmaster and OpenTable to create smoother experiences. The market is already solving this through APIs and special agent-friendly modes.
The Verdict: Should You Switch?
Have made Comet my primary browser immediately? No. I guess old habits die hard.
Will I use it strategically when it provides clear value? Absolutely, why not?
The ecosystem for agentic browsing is still developing, but I believe the direction is clear for the next generation of Internet users. As I mentioned in my previous post on agentic browsing, we’re moving from “vibe coding” to “vibe browsing”— and I believe this shift represents more than a trend. It’s the next logical evolution in how gen alpha will interact with the internet.
For now, Perplexity made the right call releasing a cut-down public version. As more people experiment with agentic browsing without the premium commitment the more useful uses cases will see. But will I maintain my premium subscription. I don’t see a complying case do so at the moment.
Agentic browsing technology is promising. The trust challenges are real for my generation but the barriers for the next will be lower & it’s arriving faster than most people would like to realise.
Techie Ranch 
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