Are AI Browsers Any Good? A Day with Perplexity’s Comet

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# Introduction

 
Many technology experts will tell you that AI browsers are the future of work. The reality is far more complicated. After spending weeks testing Perplexity’s Comet alongside ChatGPT’s Atlas browser, I discovered something uncomfortable. These tools can save you time on specific research tasks, but they fall apart on anything complex. For data scientists and analysts already overwhelmed by multiple open tabs, this is important. But before you choose Chrome over an AI browser, you need to understand what these tools actually do and, more importantly, what they cannot do.

# Understanding AI Browsers

 
An AI browser sounds like the best browser until you actually use one. At its core, it is a web browser, similar to Chrome or Safari, but with an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant integrated into a sidebar. This assistant can read any webpage you are viewing, answer questions about it, summarize articles, or even attempt to automate tasks — e.g. filling out forms or comparing prices across websites.

Perplexity’s Comet is different from a traditional browser because it understands context across multiple tabs at once. If you have research papers, data dashboards, and competitor reports open simultaneously, Comet’s assistant can read all of them together and synthesize what it finds. The browser was built on Chromium, the same foundation as Google Chrome, so it supports the same extensions you already use.

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