Comet Review: An AI Browser You Shouldn''t Trust Yet
Perplexity''s Comet browser landed on Android on August 19, billed as the first agentic AI browser built for mobile. It''s free, it pulled a 4.4 average from about 1,470 reviews inside a day, and it''s genuinely good at one job.
It is not the thing to hand your bank login.
What it is
Comet is a Chromium browser with Perplexity''s assistant wired into every tab. Same Blink engine as Chrome, so your extensions mostly come with you and your habits transfer without thinking about it. Switching costs almost nothing, which is the smartest call in the whole product.
The assistant sits in a sidebar and knows where you are — which tab, what''s on the page — and it can pull from specific pages when you ask a follow-up. That sounds like a small thing. It isn''t. A chatbot in another window versus an assistant that can already see your fourteen open tabs is the difference between copying text around and just asking.
What it''s good at
Research, no argument. If your work means reading across a pile of sources and pulling them together, Comet cuts real busywork. Cross-tab summaries work. Asking what three open articles actually disagree about gets you a usable answer. For researchers, writers and analysts this is the best case anyone has made for an AI browser so far.
Form-filling holds up too. Repetitive, structured, low-stakes input is the sweet spot.
Where it falls apart
Multi-step agentic tasks. In hands-on testing the agent fumbled chained operations often enough that reviewers wouldn''t trust it with money — which is awkward, because that''s the entire pitch of an agentic browser. Booking, buying, anything with several dependent steps and a commit at the end is where it gets shaky.
And the failure mode is worse than the failure rate. An agent that fails obviously is just annoying. An agent that nails four steps, gets the fifth wrong, and tells you it''s done is a different kind of problem.
The security question nobody has answered
Every serious review ends up in the same place: they wouldn''t give Comet unrestricted access to a primary password manager, a bank account, corporate systems or sensitive email.
That hedge isn''t about Perplexity. It''s the unsolved problem for the whole category. An agent browsing on your behalf carries your sessions and your permissions, and it will eventually load a page containing text written specifically to steer it. Nobody has a robust answer to that yet. Until someone does, the sane posture is to treat an agentic browser as a capable assistant on a short leash, not a delegate.
Price, and the verdict
The browser is free — Perplexity dropped the paywall in October 2025. The agentic features and premium models live behind the $20-a-month Pro tier, with a $200 Max tier above that.
Install it if you research across a lot of tabs, or want supervised help with repetitive low-risk tasks. It isn''t a replacement for Chrome, Safari or Firefox yet, for most people.
Treat it as a research tool with a very good assistant attached and it''s excellent. Treat it as an autonomous agent and you''ll spend longer checking its work than the work would have taken you.
Image: Pixabay, via Pexels
