I switched to Perplexity Comet Browser for a week. Is it really worth the hype?

EDITOR’S NOTE

Dear future-proof humans,

Hope some of you tried out the Comet browser since our last newsletter. We would love to hear about your experiences and experiments. So, write to us (you can reply to this newsletter or hit us up on LinkedIn).

I was one of the lucky Pro users who got off the waitlist and got to try the shiny new browser almost a month ago. I would have spent nearly a week trying out new use cases just to see if the browser is as cool as they claim it to be.

I was excited, mildly impressed, but a whole lot unimpressed at the same time. Does that make sense? I have switched back to Google Chrome and am using some of the existing AI tools, plus the AI agents that we have created in the past, to get most of my work done.

In today’s newsletter, I will discuss the experiments with Comet and why I believe it’s not yet there, despite being a significant step towards the ongoing agentic revolution in the browser space.

Here’s a quick refresher of what we covered in the last edition:

Stay with us until the end of the newsletter, a small surprise, heartfelt gift is waiting just for you.

MY EXPERIMENTS WITH THE COMET BROWSER

First things first, when I tried to import my browser data from Chrome to Perplexity, it imported my browsing history, cookies, credit cards, bookmarks, saved passwords, and extensions. However, it didn’t import my open tabs or the way in which I have grouped them for easier access.

Next, I tried to automate the grouping of open tabs in the browser, and as you can see in the video above, the grouping was not smart, to say the least. It just clubbed one or two tabs under their domain name and calls it smart grouping. Not what you would expect, right? Now, I could have given some logic to group the tabs, but I didn’t. Maybe you could, and let me know if Comet is really smart.

Gmail, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp Manager

Then I made it write an email draft for me. It did a decent job, but the same feature is also available in Gemini. In fact, the draft that Gemini wrote was sharper and concise without the fluff.

I tried automating a message to my sister and dad, stating that I will call them later today after I finish my newsletter work. It worked wonderfully, and I can see why it would work best with voice commands, but the whole process took 30seconds for a 1-liner. Not the most efficient use of an agentic browser, I guess.

As a virtual assistant, Comet was able to manage email and WhatsApp quite efficiently. However, when I asked it to summarize the last 10 messages of a WhatsApp group, it simply listed the messages, without providing any summarization, unlike how it summarized emails (as seen in the previous newsletter).

I love LinkedIn, most of the time! One of the persistent issues has been retrieving old saved posts. You have to endlessly scroll to find the post that you have been looking for. So, I tried delegating this task to Comet; let’s see how it fared:

As you can see, I had to repeatedly ask it to try again or keep scrolling till it found the post that I was looking for. This highlights a very important concept of the agentic browser or AI, in general; that the agent will do everything a human can do faster, but not necessarily better. 

Comet ShortCut

I love books, one of my all-time vices. And, I have been looking forward to reading R.F. Kuang’s new book, Katabasis (because I thoroughly enjoyed Yellowface). For this use case, I tried something new: it’s called ShortCut.

As you can see from the video above, in the first attempt, it failed to provide the correct links, and in the second attempt, it missed highlighting the prices.

Table reservation for 2

Next, I tried to book a table for two people for dinner on Tuesday night at a romantic restaurant in Bangalore near me. It took me three attempts to reach a passable stage. In my first attempt, it just listed the names of the restaurants without any links, and most of the listed places were far away from me.

Then I asked it to book me a table and not just list the places. It went to the restaurant’s booking page and not Zomato, and obviously got stuck. Then I went to Zomato, where I was logged in to my account, and asked it to make the bookings. It was unable to make the bookings in the end, but at least it chose a closer restaurant. Small wins, I guess! This try is a significant improvement from the last time when I tried the same use case, which suggested an entirely new non-existent restaurant.

There is something I would like you to note, though. Perplexity users in the US may have a different experience with apps like OpenTable and Yelp, among others, because of existing integrations.

Community use cases that I liked:

I was looking at what other people have done with Comet on their X page and came across a really cool use case where the individual combined Comet, Lovable, and his digital notes to generate three interesting app prototypes. What an amazing way to kickstart your creative thinking process.

Few people have also let Comet take over their conversations with brands’ customer support chatbots. That would be an interesting experiment to try: conversations between Comet and an AI chatbot. Do we need humans anymore?

There was another person who used Comet to automate commenting on Reddit. Still, I would advise against that, as Reddit is notorious for banning accounts involved in any form of automation. You can definitely use Comet to draft a comment for you, which you later review and edit.

Product & market research

However, this gave me a cool idea: Open the product or brand’s subreddit, then ask Comet to pull the top 10 positive and top 10 negative reviews from Top posts for a chosen time frame. This information is gold to many teams within an organization, including marketing (perfect messaging), product (designing better roadmaps), and customer support (developing robust FAQs to address future issues), among others.

Create Meta ad creatives

I also attempted to automate Meta ad creatives for a brand while they were on their home page. And, it didn’t work well.

A few fun experiments

Order on Amazon

I tried ordering pet food for my puppy, but it got stuck at the sign-in stage, despite having logged in to my account. In one of the earlier attempts, it was able to complete the task but added the wrong SKU.

Play today’s WORDLE

I made it play today’s WORDLE. It took 4 attempts in 3 minutes 24 seconds to get the right word, which is not bad at all. I took 3 attempts and less than a minute to solve it, but then I have played 482 puzzles with a 98% win rate! What I am saying is that Comet did great at the puzzle.

Book tickets to a new movie

Now, let’s try booking one ticket to The Conjuring: Last Rites for the coming Wednesday evening. It was not able to book tickets due to technical issues on both major booking platforms (District and PayTm Insider, which is now District). This might have happened due to native integration issues with platforms like District.

Create a playlist on Spotify

That was a bummer, so let’s ask it to create a playlist on Spotify with Taylor Swift's all-time Top 10 songs. Not only did it make the list, but it also renamed it. Instead of checking stream counts, it scanned existing playlists with Taylor Swift songs and built my list from them. Comet took 6 minutes to create the list!

NANOBITS VERDICT

There are some handy features, all’s not bad.

1. Comet’s browser is based on Chromium, ensuring compatibility and support for Chrome extensions.

2. Onboarding and setup were simple and aesthetically pleasing.

3. Perplexity's AI assistant on the sidebar could summarize articles, answer questions, and help with research.

4. The sidebar AI made it easy to summarize YouTube videos and generate shopping lists. This is the only advantage Comet has over Google NotebookLM. 

5. Perplexity search engine replaces Google, giving detailed answers with reliable sources.

6. Built-in ad-blocker improved the browsing experience.

7. Could pull info from open tabs to compare products or answer queries.

8. Design was considered one of the most attractive among recent browsers.

9. It saves time! I scrolled through Comet’s X page to research various use cases from other users worldwide. It took me 55 minutes to complete the research, but Perplexity took 4 minutes, although its response was not accurate.

Is an agentic browser truly needed for these tasks?

1. Features available in Comet are not unique; most AI chatbots or assistants can perform similar tasks.

2. Switching browsers for integrated AI felt unnecessary; manual processes weren't complex enough to justify the change.

3. While some tasks work well, others fail or get stuck in loops. There is a lack of consistency in the results, and the results vary too.

4. Comet is currently invite-only or restricted to expensive Max-tier subscriptions ($200/month).

5. Concern that the free version might be crippled to push users toward the paid tier.

6. There are some privacy concerns due to the required access to personal data.

7. It also doesn’t request more context, unlike Perplexity’s deep research feature; for instance, if you have asked Comet to search for flight options from Bangalore to Seattle, you should be able to provide additional context while the agent is searching for flights on the web.

What really needs working?

1. Security experts discovered that Comet's AI assistant was vulnerable to manipulation by threat actors through prompt engineering.

2. Comet might be keylogging everything; one user on Reddit noted, “When I saved my payment information, it also stored my CVV, which raises significant privacy concerns.”

3. Comet resulted in CPU usage spiking to 20% and memory usage exceeding 4GB with just a few tabs when utilizing AI features, which is not ideal.

Comet is entering a crowded arena, and while it shows genuine innovation in AI-assisted browsing, I must say that it's impressive for early adopters. However, we will have to wait for v2.0 if we need reliability. I am eager for the technology to mature, while also hoping that security and privacy issues are thoroughly addressed before widespread adoption.

END NOTE

As a special thank you to our readers, we have 3 Comet browser invites to share. If you would like one, reply to this email or message us on LinkedIn, and we will send you an invite link with a smile. Hurry! The invites are first-come, first-served.