Perplexity Comet

Comet is the strongest argument yet that the AI assistant belongs in the browser rather than in a tab next to it. The everyday research loop — open six sources, copy chunks into a chat, ask which one actually answers the question — collapses into asking the browser, because the browser already has the pages. Cross-tab summarisation is the feature people notice first and keep using; comparing four product pages or four papers without pasting anything is a genuinely better workflow, not a demo.

Making it free on macOS, Windows, iOS and Android in March 2026 was the bigger move. AI browsers had been a paid curiosity; Comet turned into something you can hand to anyone, on a Chromium base that inherits Chrome's extensions and profiles so switching costs almost nothing. Ad blocking on by default is a real quality-of-life win that quietly funds itself in page-load time.

The two caveats are serious and pull in opposite directions. Agentic tasks — the headline capability — are metered, and the free allowance disappears fast, which nudges heavy users toward Pro at $20 a month. More importantly, an agent acting inside a browser holding your logged-in sessions is a category of risk the whole industry is still learning to handle: a malicious page can attempt to instruct the agent, and the blast radius includes anything you are signed into. That is not a Comet-specific flaw, but it is Comet's to carry, and the sensible posture is to use agentic mode deliberately rather than habitually.

Verdict: worth installing, because it is free, familiar and genuinely better at multi-source research than a browser plus a chatbot. Use the assistant freely, use the agent sparingly, and if the idea of either having access to your sessions bothers you, the Perplexity app gets you most of the value with none of the exposure.