If you’re the type who can’t help but violently roll your eyes at the mere mention of AI, you’d better hold on to those balls of jelly — Perplexity has made its purpose-built AI browser, ‘Comet’, available to everyone for free.
From its release in July this year, the browser was only available to macOS users of Perplexity’s Max subscription for $200/m (~R3,450/m). Now, thankfully, Perplexity has made it free for everyone, including Windows users.
Perplexity shoots its Comet at everyone
If you aren’t one of the macOS-using Perplexity Max subscribers who got to try it out first, or don’t even know what we’re on about, Comet is an AI-powered, Chromium-based browser.
The ‘AI-powered’ part means it was designed with AI functionality built in, and the ‘Chromium-based’ part means if you’re coming from another Chromium-based browser, like Chrome, your bookmarks, extensions, browsing history (if you want it), and bookmarks should transfer over without much fuss. It’s also got Perplexity’s AI assistant at the ready, of course.
Perplexity, the company, not the assistant, believes that “the internet is broken”.
“Today, the internet has stifled our curiosity. Knowledge work taught us to have answers, not questions. The clicks and traffic model of the web has done nothing but convert it into a digital yellow pages, where every path leads to a checkout button. Wherever you are on the internet today, you’re in somebody’s purchase funnel,” reads the blog post.
The implication here is that Comet can ‘fix it’.
“When Perplexity users first downloaded Comet, the number of questions they asked increased by 6-18X in the first day. Curiosity is in all of us. Suddenly, asking new questions is easier, the delightful default-mode of internet use. We learned: the internet is better on Comet,” the post continues.
As for the actual browser, we’ve yet to dip our toes in, but it apparently has some neat tricks up its sleeve. Tricks like sorting your emails, analysing your calendar, clearing distracting tabs, or booking a flight.
Without having used it, we don’t think we’d be that quick to trust it with something as important as booking a flight. And it’s still an AI assistant based on large language models from Perplexity itself, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, so you should still take the information it gives you with a pinch of salt.
It’s currently only available on desktop platforms for the moment, although Perplexity did say the mobile app was in the works. The browser might be free to use, but Perplexity also announced the $5/m Comet Plus subscription for curated news content from “some of the world’s most reputable sources of news and information.”
Want to try Comet for yourself? Download it here.
