Comet Browser Review: Perplexity's AI Browser in 2026

Comet is Perplexity’s answer to the question every browser maker seems to be asking right now: what if the AI assistant lived inside the browser instead of a separate tab? It made a noisy debut as an invite-only, subscription-gated product, then Perplexity opened it up for free worldwide in October 2025. That alone is worth a fresh look.

This review sticks to what Perplexity has published on its own pages, plus what rival vendors say about their own AI features for comparison. Perplexity’s site was returning a bot-check page throughout this research pass in September 2026, so some feature-level claims about Comet are flagged as unconfirmed rather than guessed at. You’ll get a straight answer on pricing, platforms, and how Comet fits next to Chrome, Edge, Atlas, and the rest — plus what to do about your tabs, since that’s the part most reviews skip.

What Is Comet Browser?

Comet is Perplexity AI’s own web browser, built to put the company’s AI search and reasoning tools directly into your browsing instead of leaving them in a separate app or tab. Perplexity is best known for its AI answer engine, and Comet is the company’s bet that the browser itself is the better place to deliver that.

Technically, Comet is a Chromium-based browser, so it shares its rendering engine with Chrome, Edge, Brave, and a handful of other browsers you’ll recognize. Its canonical marketing address is perplexity.ai/comet — the shorter comet.perplexity.ai address redirects there, which is a useful way to confirm you’re looking at Perplexity’s real page and not an impostor.

Whether you know it as the Comet AI browser, the Comet web browser, the Comet internet browser, or (in German-language searches) the Comet KI browser, it’s the same product from the same company. That’s worth knowing if you’re comparing notes with someone searching in a different language or using different shorthand.

That’s roughly what “AI browser” means across the board right now: Google’s Gemini describes its Auto Browse feature as handling “multi-step chores” such as planning trips, filling out forms, scheduling appointments, and managing subscriptions; Dia’s homepage describes a similar ambition with a daily “Morning Brief” pulling from your calendar and inbox, plus a cross-tool “Synthesis” search. Comet’s own public description doesn’t go into that level of detail as of this review, which is part of why several sections below flag specific features as unconfirmed rather than assumed.

If you’re trying to decide between Comet and the half-dozen other AI browsers that launched around the same time, our best AI browsers comparison covers Comet, Atlas, and Copilot Mode side by side, and is a good next stop after this review.

Quick Answer: Should You Try Comet in 2026?

Short version: try Comet if you’re curious about AI-first browsing and don’t mind a newer product, but keep a browser BelayTab supports running alongside it if tab safety matters to you. Comet is free, which lowers the risk of testing it, but its feature set and platform coverage are thinner on the public record than long-established browsers.

The table leans cautious on purpose. A one-year-old product from a company whose core business is search, not browsers, is a reasonable thing to try. It’s a riskier thing to depend on for work you can’t afford to lose. See our browser comparison hub for how Comet’s confirmed facts stack up against other Chromium browsers on a feature-by-feature basis.

How Much Does Comet Browser Cost?

Comet itself costs nothing. Perplexity made it free for everyone worldwide on October 2, 2025, ending its earlier run as a $200-per-month exclusive, and the company’s own blog states it “will always be free.”

Two optional paid layers sit on top of that free base:

• Comet Plus — $5 per month, focused on premium publisher content.
• Perplexity Pro — $20 per month, Perplexity’s broader subscription, which also unlocks Comet Plus.

Neither add-on is required to use Comet as a browser. If your interest in Comet is purely “a free Chromium browser with an AI assistant baked in,” the $0 tier covers that. The paid tiers exist for people who want deeper access to Perplexity’s search and content products, not for basic browsing.

Stack that against the rest of the field and Comet looks generous on price. Opera Neon’s built-in essentials (tab management, ad blocking, a VPN) are free, but its agentic AI tier costs $19.90 a month, roughly four times Comet Plus. OpenAI hasn’t published a price for Atlas at all, which makes any pricing comparison there incomplete rather than favorable or unfavorable. If price alone is your filter for trying an AI browser, Comet and Dia’s free downloads sit at the low-friction end of this list.

What Platforms Does Comet Browser Support?

Comet is confirmed for macOS and Windows, with a mobile build referenced but not fully dated. Perplexity publishes separate enterprise install guides for both desktop operating systems, which is a reasonably strong signal that both are first-class, supported platforms rather than experimental builds.

Beyond that, Perplexity’s own changelog references an “iOS Launch” alongside computer updates, which confirms a mobile build exists in some form. What it doesn’t give us is a dated, official release-notes page pinning down when iOS or Android became generally available, or whether both platforms shipped at once.

What’s missing from the public record entirely, as of this review, is any mention of Linux or Chromebook support. That’s not the same as confirming Comet doesn’t work there. It just means Perplexity hasn’t published anything we could verify either way. If your daily driver is a Chromebook, our Chrome on Chromebook coverage and the wider browser hub are safer starting points until Comet’s Linux story is clearer.

Is Comet Built on Chromium, and Why Does That Matter?

Yes, Comet is built on Chromium, the open-source browser engine that also powers Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc, and Dia. For everyday browsing, that shared foundation means Comet renders web pages the same way those other browsers do, so most sites that work in Chrome should work in Comet.

Chromium is a foundation, not a finished product, though. Two browsers can share the same engine and still diverge sharply on features, update speed, and long-term support. Arc, for example, now tells its own users it “receives Chromium updates only” and points people toward its sibling browser Dia for active security patches — a reminder that “Chromium-based” alone doesn’t tell you how well-maintained a specific browser is. Our Arc browser status guide and Dia browser review cover that transition in more detail if you want the full picture.

For Comet specifically, we don’t have an equivalent public statement from Perplexity about its own update cadence, so it’s fair to say only what’s confirmed: it’s Chromium-based, and beyond that, treat update-frequency claims as unverified until Perplexity publishes something concrete.

The Dia story is also a preview of where AI browsers might be heading generally. Atlassian’s acquisition of The Browser Company (the same company behind Arc and Dia) closed October 21, 2025 for $610 million in cash, and Atlassian’s own announcement describes Dia as built for workflows rather than just browsing. That kind of consolidation, one company after another buying its way into the browser, is a pattern worth watching if you’re picking one of these tools to depend on for years rather than months.

How Does Comet Compare to Other AI Browsers?

Comet is one of several AI-first browsers that launched or relaunched between late 2025 and 2026, and the honest comparison depends on what each vendor has actually published, not marketing buzz. Here’s what’s confirmed for each, side by side.

A few things stand out from that table. Brave Leo is the only one confirmed across five platforms including Linux and both mobile OSes. Atlas is the newest arrival and, per OpenAI’s own launch post, started narrowest — macOS-only at first. Comet sits in between: broader than Atlas at launch, narrower than Leo on confirmed platforms.

One more player is worth knowing about, even though it doesn’t fit neatly into the table above: Firefox’s AI sidebar isn’t a single branded assistant. Mozilla lets you pick a chatbot provider — Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Le Chat Mistral, and, from Firefox 143 onward, Microsoft Copilot — each with its own free option, and the sidebar can summarize the page you’re on by sending that content and the page title to whichever provider you chose. It’s a different model from Comet’s single built-in assistant: more choice, but more privacy policies to trust.

If you want the fuller feature-by-feature version of this table, including OpenAI’s own Atlas announcement and Microsoft’s Copilot Mode post, our AI browser comparison goes deeper than a single review can.

What Are the Privacy and Safety Trade-Offs of an AI Browser?

The honest answer is that AI browsers that can act on your behalf (clicking, filling forms, completing purchases) carry a different risk profile than browsers that just render pages, and each vendor describes its own safeguards differently. Comet-specific safety language wasn’t available from Perplexity’s own site during this review’s research pass, so this section draws on what comparable vendors say about their own products, as a benchmark for what to look for.

• Google (Gemini Auto Browse). States it trained its models “to detect common AI threats such as prompt injection” and designs the feature to “pause and explicitly ask for your confirmation” before purchases or social posts.
• Microsoft (Edge Copilot Mode). Says “your data stays yours,” that data is “never shared without your permission,” and shows “clear visual cues” when Copilot is taking an action, listening, or viewing.
• Brave (Leo). States Leo “doesn’t retain or share chats, or use them for additional model training,” requires no account, and doesn’t collect identifiers like your IP address.
• The Browser Company (Dia). Directly acknowledges prompt-injection risk, describing its own defenses as “layered but imperfect” rather than a guarantee.

This is also where the Chromium-based framing from earlier matters again: the underlying engine handles page rendering and standard web security, but the AI layer each vendor builds on top is a separate trust decision you’re making about that specific company.

Does Comet Browser Support Extensions?

This isn’t confirmed on any official Perplexity page reachable during this review’s research pass, so the honest answer is: check Perplexity’s own site before assuming either way. Being Chromium-based doesn’t automatically guarantee Chrome Web Store compatibility. That depends on choices the vendor makes, and different Chromium browsers handle it differently.

If extensions are central to how you work (a password manager, an ad blocker, a tab manager) that’s a good reason to lean on a browser with clearly documented extension support while Comet’s story is still filling in. Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, and Firefox all have well-documented extension ecosystems; our guide to finding and vetting Chrome Web Store extensions is a useful reference regardless of which Chromium browser you end up using day to day.

For a sense of how differently browsers handle this even when they share components, look at Orion, a WebKit-based browser from Kagi that isn’t Chromium at all: it supports installing extensions from three separate stores (Safari’s, Chrome’s, and Firefox’s) through a curated set of roughly twenty guaranteed-to-work options. That shows extension support is a deliberate choice each vendor makes, not something that comes free with a given rendering engine. Comet inheriting Chromium doesn’t tell you which choice Perplexity has made.

It’s worth checking back on this specific question periodically. Extension support is exactly the kind of feature that newer browsers add after launch once they’ve built out account systems, sync, and core browsing first — so today’s unconfirmed answer may simply become a documented “yes” or “no” later in 2026.

How Do You Avoid Losing Tabs While Using Comet?

The safest approach is to treat any newer browser, Comet included, as a place you’re testing rather than a place you fully trust with irreplaceable work, until it has a longer track record. That’s not a knock on Comet specifically. It applies to any one-year-old product, AI-powered or not.

1. Bookmark or export before you switch. Before opening Comet for a work session, bookmark or export the tabs you’d be upset to lose from whatever browser you’re currently using.
2. Keep your main research window in a supported browser. If you’re doing deep, multi-tab research, do it in a browser with mature session recovery rather than a browser still building out that feature set.
3. Don’t assume cross-browser sync exists. No browser vendor automatically hands your open tabs from one company’s product to another’s — if you want that, you need to build the habit yourself or use a tool designed for it.
4. Recheck Comet’s own recovery features periodically. As Comet matures, check its own documentation for session recovery specifics rather than assuming it works the way Chrome or Edge does.

This is a general habit worth having regardless of which new browser you’re trying, and it’s the same advice we’d give for any browser without a long public track record on crash recovery — see our guide on what to do when tab overload gets out of hand for more on keeping a research session under control in the first place.

Does BelayTab Work With Comet Browser?

No — as of September 2026, BelayTab does not support Comet. BelayTab currently works on Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc, Firefox, and Safari on Mac, and Comet isn’t on that list. We’d rather tell you that plainly than let you assume otherwise.

That doesn’t mean Comet users are out of options, though. If you use Comet alongside any of BelayTab’s supported browsers (which is common, since most people keep more than one browser installed) you can still protect the tabs that live in that other browser completely.

BelayTab is free with no account and no limits on sessions or tabs, so there’s no cost to running it in whichever supported browser handles your important work while you experiment with Comet on the side. See how saving works and how recovery works for the full detail, and check the full list of supported browsers if you’re not sure which of your installed browsers qualifies.

It’s also worth knowing what Sync, BelayTab’s optional paid tier, covers here. Sync keeps sessions available across browsers you sign into and keeps 90 days of cloud version history, but it only works between browsers BelayTab supports. It can’t reach into Comet and pull tabs out, since BelayTab can’t run inside Comet at all. Even on the free tier, every saved session keeps the last 20 versions, so restoring never overwrites; it adds a new version instead, and anything you delete sits in a 30-day trash before it’s gone.