The Rise of Agentic Browsers: A Showdown Between Dia and Comet |

The concept of an agentic browser is incredibly exciting, and it feels like we may finally be on the cusp of a new era in web interaction. The past month alone saw the release of a couple of major AI browsers: Dia from the Browser Company and Comet from Perplexity.

While we've seen agentic consumer products before, such as Operator from ChatGPT or even Project Mariner from Google, which can complete tasks for you, both of these require navigating into a separate interface and spinning up a project. Consequently, many users haven't integrated them into their daily routines as much as initially expected.

The promise of an AI browser is that it bakes the power of AI into everything you do. You don't have to navigate somewhere else to use it; it works alongside you to make every task a little bit easier and more delightful. Both Dia and Comet are beautiful products and are genuinely fun to use. But do either of them live up to the AI-native vision? This article presents an extensive week-long test to find out, scoring them on core features to try to pick a winner in the battle of the agentic browsers.

Core Features: The Common Ground

First, both browsers have a few core features in common. Most notably, there's an AI chat assistant that pops up on the side. It can take the context of whatever is on your page—or even specific things you've highlighted or screenshotted—as an input for a question, a draft you're trying to write, or a project.

This is quite useful for tasks like summarizing an article without having to drop a link into a separate chat application. It's also great for activities like shopping. For instance, you might be on a product page and want to find a less expensive alternative, and both browsers can do that for you very easily. Because of this, you may find yourself using AI a lot more throughout the day. It feels more casual than exerting the extra effort to drop everything into a chatbot.

Search and Summarization: Perplexity's Edge

On things like basic search and summarization, Perplexity has a natural edge with Comet, given this is their core product, and they secure the win here. For most head-to-head searches across the browsers, Perplexity's formatting and sourcing were preferable, appearing just a little bit cleaner than how Dia structured its information.

Perplexity also gets the win on more complex or advanced searches. On Comet, you can use Perplexity's version of deep research to perform more in-depth searches without requiring a lot of sophisticated prompting.

Both browsers also feature voice modes where you can dictate with speech. This seems to be a featured use case of Dia in particular, given you can also set up a specific coding module where you provide the browser with instructions on your preferences for coding languages or formats that you want it to default to. Additionally, both browsers offer the ability to personalize, where you teach them more about yourself and what you care about to enable better results, though they approach this in different ways.

Dia's Specialty: Workflow Automation with Skills

Where Dia really shines is with what they call "skills." Dia can function more like a ChatGPT replacement with a focus on workflows than a true browser. It seems somewhat catered to that use case, as there's no top navigation bar to type in a URL, though you can, of course, search the web or go to a website through the Dia chat interface.

On Dia, you can personalize the browser to who you are, what you do, and even how you talk, and then build out skills or tasks that you run with a single tag.

Example: Creator Outreach

Let's say you're a creator and want to reach out to a bunch of brands. You can create a skill for an outreach email and leave spaces where you want Dia to conduct research.

Here is how you might structure the prompt: - Your Info: "I am a creator focusing on [Your Niche] with an audience of [Your Audience Size] on [Your Platform]." - The Task: "Draft a personalized outreach email to the creator team at [Brand Website URL]. Research the brand and find the relevant contact information."

When you come across a brand, you can either give Dia the URL or prompt it directly from the brand's website. Dia then does all the research on the brand and their creator team and drafts a personalized email. This is so much faster than having to do the research yourself every time.

Dia's interface is also especially helpful if you're the type of person who has numerous tabs open with shared context or if you want to upload files as extra context. For example, you might open up over 10 articles on the same topic you're researching and ask Dia to summarize them all. Or, if you're looking for an Airbnb and have several options open, you can tell it to look across all your tabs and create a comparison table of the core features. Perplexity also has tab-specific queries, but the experience feels slightly more intuitive on Dia.

Comet's Power: A True Agent for Action

Where Perplexity's Comet shines is in driving action across core apps. It's a real agent. When you set up Comet, you can authenticate into Google Calendar, Google Drive, Dropbox, and WhatsApp. Then, you can not only search across these products, your browser history, and your Perplexity history but also push tasks to them via the Comet interface. This means you can send an email or schedule a meeting directly within Comet.

Here are a few use cases that prove to be highly valuable: - Information Retrieval: Pulling information out of old emails or meeting records. For example: "What's my flight information?", "What's the confirmation code?", or "What's my mileage number?" - Inbox Triage: It can highlight your most important missed emails. - Bill Management: It can find things like unpaid bills and direct you to where to pay them. - Calendar Management: This is another significant advantage. For instance, you can execute the following sequence in seconds: 1. Find out when your last one-on-one was with someone. 2. Schedule a new one for the next day. 3. Send them an email to let them know it's happening.

This all happens directly through Comet in about 30 seconds. On Comet, you can also set up tasks on a recurring basis. This is where having a browser becomes a real advantage for Perplexity because it can push the results back to you from those tasks without you having to decide to go use the application at the right time. This is a key reason why many users may not use dedicated chatbot tasks as much—they aren't living in that interface all day.

Perplexity is also more agentic in general. As an example, you can ask Comet to find and purchase a book for a 5-year-old's birthday. This is where some of their other products, like shopping, really come into play. If you've already saved your billing and shipping info, it can complete purchases on your behalf in basically one click. Other horizontal agent products currently require you to enter your payment info every time, which can be a pain.

Perplexity also wins on collaboration. They have "spaces" built into the browser that support longer-term work that you can share and collaborate on with other people. It can be described as a Google Folder with search built-in. You can use templates to get started—for example, if you're planning a trip—and then personalize them with your context and share them with others who might want to work on it with you.

The Verdict: Which AI Browser Reigns Supreme?

So, between Comet and Dia, Comet wins for now as a core browser. However, Dia's powerful skills are compelling enough to make it a daily tool for specific workflows. If you're willing to put in the work on onboarding, it's a really powerful product.

The Future of Agentic Browsing