Perplexity upgrades Comet to multitask across your tabs (www.techradar.com)

Perplexity upgraded its Comet Assistant to multitask across browser tabs and sustain longer, multi-step jobs. The AI — embedded in Perplexity’s browser experience — now keeps broader cross-tab context, simultaneously scanning tabs and apps for research, data entry and reference tasks, and can directly interact with pages (click links, fill forms, extract data) after asking for user permission. The update boosts Comet’s “attention span” and web awareness, with internal tests showing a 23% improvement in successful task completion and notably better performance on long, branching instructions like comparing flight deals across sites or aggregating attendance data from multiple portals. For the AI/ML community this signals practical progress toward reliable, context-aware browser agents: state tracking across tabs, multi-action orchestration, and a persistent consent layer that balances automation with user control. Technically, the implications are increased context windowing across web sessions, more robust planning over multi-step tasks, and safer action execution via explicit permission that persists for the task. Limitations remain — Comet can’t autonomously run entire projects or always prioritize nuance — but its pragmatic approach to multitasking and permissioned automation positions it as a useful step toward more capable, user-controlled web agents amid competing browser assistants.