Aravind Srinivas has been talking about Comet like it’s already won, and after his pitch crossed my timeline for the fourth time this week I finally gave in and installed it. Comet is Perplexity’s AI browser, a full Chromium build with an assistant baked into the side and an agent that can click around pages on your behalf. My HN feed today is also wall-to-wall with open-source browser agents, autoscaling launches, and yet another leaderboard, so the timing felt right to actually sit with the thing people keep typing into search.

So I made it my main browser for a week. These are my notes.

What Comet actually gets right

The research experience is genuinely good. Perplexity’s whole identity is answering questions with sources, and that strength carries straight into the browser, so asking “summarize this page and tell me what it’s leaving out” feels native instead of bolted on. The sidebar knows what tab you’re looking at. It pulls context without you pasting anything in.

The agent mode is real too. I asked it to extract a list of items out of a messy internal dashboard and it worked through the pages on its own, no babysitting. It’s fast. And the UI is clean in a way early AI products almost never are, the kind of clean where you can tell a design team actually fought for it.

It’s a competent browser underneath, too. Tabs, bookmarks, most extensions just work, because it’s Chromium. Nobody’s going to feel lost.

The download is the whole ballgame

The part nobody in the launch threads wants to dwell on: to use Comet, you have to switch browsers.

That sounds small. It is not small. Your logins, your saved passwords, your pinned tabs, the seventeen Google accounts you’ve somehow accumulated, the muscle memory of where every button lives, the pile of extensions you forgot you installed but would absolutely scream about the second they vanished. All of that lives in the browser you already use, and none of it transfers as cleanly as a setup wizard promises. Asking someone to move is asking them to rebuild their entire working life in a new house, and most people will poke around the new place for an afternoon, admire the kitchen, then quietly drift back to the old one where they already know where the light switches are.

I did exactly that. I gave Comet a real week, imported what I could, pinned my usual tabs. And on day eight I noticed I was back in Chrome without having consciously decided anything, because that’s where I was already logged into everything and that’s where the actual work had been sitting the whole time. The browser didn’t fail me. The switching cost just quietly outweighed the upside, every single day, until I stopped fighting it.

But I already live in Chrome

This is the case for the extension approach, and it’s the bet we made with Dassi. Instead of a new browser, you drop an AI agent into the Chrome you’re already signed into. Same tabs. Same sessions. Same logins. The agent sees what you see and acts where you already are.

Because the session is already authenticated, there’s no OAuth dance, no re-logging into Gmail or your CRM or the internal tool with the expired SSO. The agent just inherits your tab. That’s a far smaller ask than “uninstall your life,” and smaller asks are the ones people actually say yes to.

Dassi is free, runs in the side panel, and lets you log in with your existing ChatGPT subscription or bring your own key for Claude, Gemini, whatever you prefer. If you want to poke at it, it’s on the Chrome Web Store.

So who is Comet for?

People who genuinely want a new default browser and don’t mind the migration tax. That’s a real group, just a much smaller one than a 9.8K-a-month search term implies.

If your actual question is whether an AI can read the page in front of you and do something useful with it, you do not need to change browsers to get that. I dug into the privacy side in what actually gets sent to Perplexity, and into the wider field in best AI browsers in 2026.

Comet is good. I mean that plainly. The team built something polished and the agent works. But “good product, wrong unit of adoption” is a brutal spot to be in, and Perplexity picked the single hardest distribution path for a capability that fits comfortably inside the browser you never bother to close.

Damn shame, almost, because the AI part is the easy part now.