Perplexity Comet Review: 60 Days With the AI Browser Trying to Replace Chrome

So three weeks into living in Comet I was trying to book a flight to Tokyo. I had four tabs open — Google Flights, Kayak, Skyscanner, and the United app. The old way of doing this would be flipping between tabs like a guy playing a tiny piano with one finger, and at the end you screenshot the cheapest one and convince yourself it was a fair fight. Instead I just opened Comet’s sidebar and said, “Find the cheapest LAX-NRT in October across all four of these tabs, including layovers under six hours.” And Comet went off and did it. Across four tabs. And gave me a one-line answer. With sources. I stared at my screen for a second and then I said out loud, “Oh.”

That’s the kind of moment Perplexity is selling with Comet. They’re saying the browser shouldn’t just render pages; it should *do things across them.* And after sixty days of using it as my daily driver, I have a lot to say about whether that pitch actually holds up.

What Comet actually is

Comet is a web browser built on Chromium — same foundation as Chrome, Brave, and Arc — with the Perplexity assistant baked into a persistent sidebar that can read everything you’re looking at. Standard Chrome extensions mostly work. You sign in with a Perplexity account, and your queries, history, and saved threads all sync.

The interesting part is the agent layer. You can tell Comet to do things — “summarize these five articles,” “fill out this form using my LinkedIn,” “compare the pricing on these tabs,” “book a flight under $700” — and it will attempt to carry that out, reading tabs and clicking buttons on your behalf. It’s not perfect. It’s the most agent-y browser I’ve used, by a wide margin.

Perplexity reportedly hit somewhere between a $9 and $14 billion valuation in 2024-2025, which is approximately the kind of money you don’t raise to make a slightly better search box. They want the browser. The browser is the surface.

The 60-day setup

I made Comet my default browser on a 16-inch MacBook Pro M3 Max running macOS Sonoma. I kept Chrome installed as the bail-out option for the things that broke, which was a smaller number than I expected. My day is mostly research, writing, light dev work, customer calls, and an unhealthy amount of Twitter. I’m not a heavy gamer or a designer running massive Figma boards, so my browser is basically a knowledge tool with some video tabs.

I tracked: how often I bailed back to Chrome, how often Comet did something Chrome couldn’t, battery impact, and the specific friction moments that almost made me uninstall.

What Comet nails

Multi-tab research is genuinely different. Asking a question across the five tabs I have open beats every single way I used to do this — manual reading, ChatGPT extension copy-paste, Perplexity-in-a-tab. The sidebar already has the context. You ask, it answers, it cites. This alone moved my research workflow noticeably.

Summarization without the dance. Highlight any selection on any page, right-click, “summarize.” That’s it. No copy-paste. No tab switch. It’s the kind of feature that I would have called incremental three years ago and now is one of the three things that keeps me here.

Agent tasks that aren’t catastrophic. I had Comet fill out a vendor onboarding form for me using a LinkedIn URL. It pulled the right fields, put them in the right places, paused for me to confirm edge cases, and submitted. I had it compare pricing across three SaaS landing pages and produce a one-sentence verdict per tier. These are tiny things. They add up.

The sidebar’s context awareness is the killer feature. Comet’s assistant has the current tab, your highlight, and your recent history all available. Asking “what’s this person known for” while reading their Wikipedia page returns a tighter answer than asking ChatGPT in a separate window. The context handoff is invisible. That’s the whole game.

What Comet fumbles

Battery. Comet was visibly heavier on my battery than Chrome — roughly 15-20% shorter unplugged life across my normal day. Not a deal-breaker but noticeable. If you live on planes or in coffee shops without outlets, this matters more than feature lists.

Extension edge cases. Most Chrome extensions work. A few don’t. I had two password manager edge cases I had to manually resolve. My fancy email client extension misbehaved for the first week. This will improve. But it’s not a frictionless port.

Agent confidence. When Comet’s agent attempts something it shouldn’t, it doesn’t always know it shouldn’t. I asked it to “summarize my emails from this morning” and it tried, which it shouldn’t have done because I hadn’t given it Gmail access. The error handling on the failure path was vague. There’s a real risk of an agent confidently doing the wrong thing across tabs, and I had two instances of this in sixty days that I caught before damage. I don’t know what I missed.

Privacy worry. Look, an AI browser sees everything you do online. The data you hand to Comet — every page, every query, every form — is many times richer than what you hand to ChatGPT. Perplexity says the right things about privacy. But the trust ask is bigger than the product is selling. You should know what you’re trading.

Comet vs Arc vs Chrome + ChatGPT extension

Arc was the closest competitor when it was actively developed by The Browser Company, with its split views and Spaces. Arc is now in its weird limbo phase since the team pivoted to Dia and then to other things, so I’m comparing Comet to ghost Arc, which isn’t fair to either.

Chrome with the ChatGPT browser extension gets you 60% of what Comet does. The killer thing Comet does better is the cross-tab agent and the sidebar-with-context-awareness. If you don’t care about either, Chrome plus a good extension is honestly fine.

Brave is for the privacy crowd; Comet is for the productivity-maxxing crowd. Different products. Different audiences. Don’t compare them.

Verdict + who it’s for

If your day is research, comparison, multi-tab synthesis, and “do this thing across these websites,” Comet is genuinely the best browser I’ve used. Buy it, install it, give it a month, and you will not go back.

If your day is gaming, design tools, hardcore developer work, or anything where extension fidelity matters more than AI synthesis, stay on Chrome. Comet is a tool. It’s not a religion.

If you’re privacy-paranoid: don’t use it. Or use it for a specific workflow and keep Chrome for everything else. The trust ask is real.

I’m staying. The Tokyo flight moment happens about twice a week now, and the productivity I get from those moments more than buys back the battery hit. Your mileage will vary by exactly what you do online. But the category is real, the product is the best one in it, and the gap to Chrome is wider than I expected going in.

FAQ

Is Comet free?

There’s a free tier. Heavier agent features and faster models live behind Perplexity Pro at $20/month.

Can it really book flights for me?

Sort of. It can do the research and prep the booking. The actual payment step still wants you in the loop. Which is correct.

Does it work on Windows or Linux?

Mac and Windows as of this writing. Linux support has been requested loudly enough that it’s likely coming.

Will it replace Chrome for normies?

Eventually maybe. Not yet. The defaults Chrome ships with — Google account sync, payment auto-fill, the whole ecosystem — are sticky in a way features can’t unseat in twelve months.