Perplexity releases Comet browser for free on Windows and macOS (www.ghacks.net)

Perplexity has opened Comet, its agentic AI browser, to all users on Windows and macOS (it launched to subscribers in July). Comet is a Chromium-based browser with a familiar UI that layers Perplexity’s assistant front-and-center: a Summarize button, an Assistant chatbot, voice mode, and a New Tab “search assistant” that defaults to Perplexity search (changeable in settings). It can import bookmarks/passwords/history, run multi-step agentic tasks (e.g., find coupons, compare phones and generate a PDF), pause those automation runs, and supports Chrome Web Store extensions. UX notes: initial run includes an animated intro with sound, heavy sign-in prompts on each new tab, a built-in ad blocker (incomplete on YouTube), and telemetry/default app options enabled by default unless you opt out. For the AI/ML community, Comet is another practical experiment in bringing agentic, web-operating models into everyday tooling: it demonstrates how models can execute compound browsing workflows and interact with commerce flows, which raises both product opportunity and research questions around reliability, safety, and privacy. Perplexity also introduced Comet Plus (a $5 opt-in) and publisher partnerships to let the model access paywalled news—an alternate approach to the ongoing debate about AI scraping and publisher compensation. Available now for Windows/macOS (no Linux yet), Comet’s release accelerates the trend of agentic browsers while spotlighting concerns around data sharing, default telemetry, and how AI assistants should be governed.