I got early access to Perplexity’s new Comet browser. After 48 hours of living in it, I am not impressed with its agentic capabilities as it stands today. I did not feel the ‘magic. YET. There’s some gap between demos by Aravind Srinivas and reality.
Though my initial impression was underwhelming, this is also the first AI browser product that made me stop and think: "Oh. This is what the future could look like”.
You can check out Comet’s website to understand all the areas it’s supposed to excel at but I will show you where it falls apart.
TL:DR - The agent is surprisingly brittle. In most test cases, it couldn’t ensure 100% completion of prompted actions or transactions. Stops at 30-40% at times. It crashes on unexpected UI patterns and there’s little transparency about what it's doing in the background. The browser itself misses many power-user features at the moment. The Mac app is extremely laggy and borderline unusable.
I told Comet to “Book me a table for 4 at an Italian place in Indiranagar tonight around 8pm”. Here’s what happened next: > Searched for restaurants fitting this criteria > Finalised an option based on ratings > Looked up for information about how to reserve a table there > Finds the reservation page on the restaurant site and fills the form > Form does not proceed further after input; task fails > Comet blames the site’s reservation system for not processing bookings > Returns me the restaurant’s contact numbers
For another similar request, Comet couldn’t interact programmatically with Zomato’s reservation page for that restaurant despite ample availability.
All this only goes to show it’s still very early days. Comet's superpower remains that it's the first truly agentic browser. Not AI-assisted. Agentic.
The websites of the future however must be designed not for humans but agents like Comet. Having the best product wouldn’t help if an agent can’t navigate your site easily. I can already see someone building a startup that certifies e-commerces websites to be ‘Built for Agents’.
The real friction remains trust. When Comet navigates for you, you're watching nervously, wondering if it understood correctly. The cognitive load of babysitting an AI agent sometimes exceeds just doing the task yourself.
Comet is promising but I will wait for further updates before giving it another shot. Currently, it's like an intern who's brilliant 70% of the time and completely lost the other 30%. I am confident it will get exponentially better as it starts to understand how to best navigate the most popular websites and do common actions.
Most obvious roadblocks are captchas, AI crawler blockers, login/paywalls, traditional multi-step authentication etc. The internet as a whole needs to be reimagined for the impending agentic future.
Without these fundamental changes, general AI agents promising end-to-end automations are dead on arrival.
*The video below is sped up 8x.