The Era of the AI Browser Is Here

For nearly three years, Arc from The Browser Company has been my daily driver. To be sure, there was a little bit of a learning curve. Tabs disappeared after a day unless you pinned them. Then they became almost like bookmarks. Tabs were on the left side of the window, not at the top. Spaces let me organize my tabs based on use cases like personal, work, or finances. I could switch between tabs using control-Tab and saw little thumbnails of the pages, similar to the app switcher on my Mac. Shift-command-C copied the current page’s URL. 

All these little interface ideas added up to a productivity machine for web jockeys like myself. And so, I was saddened to hear in May that The Browser Company stopped actively developing Arc in favor of a new AI-powered browser called Dia. (They are keeping Arc updated with maintenance releases.)

They had started beta-testing Dia with college students first and just recently opened it up to Arc members. I finally got access to Dia a few weeks ago. 

But before diving into Dia, I should mention I also got access to another AI browser, Perplexity’s Comet about a week ago. I’m on their Pro plan but somehow got an invite in my email. I had thought it was limited to those on their much more expensive Max plan only. Shhh.

So this post is about both and how the future of web browsing is obviously AI-assisted, because it feels so natural.

Chat With Your Tabs

To be honest, I used Dia in fits and starts. It was easy to import my profiles from Arc and have all my bookmarks transferred over. But, I was missing all the pro-level UI niceties that Arc had. Tabs were back at the top and acted like tabs (though they just brought back sidebar tabs in the last week). There were no spaces. I felt like it was 2021 all over again. I tried to stick with it for a week. 

What Dia offers that Arc does not is, of course, a way to “chat” with your tabs. It’s a chat sidebar to the right of the web page that has the context of that page you’re on. You can also add additional tabs to the chat context by simply @mentioning them.

In a recent article about Dia in The New York Times, reporter Brian X. Chen describes using it to summarize a 22-minute YouTube video about car jump starters, instantly surfacing the top products without watching the whole thing. This is a vivid illustration of the “chat with your tabs” value prop. Saving time.

I’ve been doing the same thing. Asking the chat to summarize a page for me or explain some technical documentation to me in plain English. Or I use it as a fuzzy search to find a quote from the page that mentions something specific. For example, if I’m reading an interview with the CEO of Perplexity and I want to know if he’s tried the Dia browser yet, I can ask, “Has he used Dia yet?” Instead of reading through the whole thing. 

Another use case is to open a few tabs and ask for advice. For example, I can open up a few shirts from an e-commerce store and ask for a recommendation.

Dia also has customizable “skills” which are essentially pre-saved prompts. I made one to craft summary bios from LinkedIn profiles.

It’s cool. But I found that it’s a little limited because the chat is usually just with the tabs that you feed Dia. It helps you digest and process information. In other words, it’s an incremental step up from ChatGPT.

Enter Comet.

Browsing Done for You

Comet by Perplexity also allows you to chat with your tabs. Asking about that Verge interview, I received a very similar answer. (No, Aravind Srinivas has not used Dia yet.) And because Perplexity search is integrated into Comet, I find that it is much better at context-setting and answering questions than Dia. But that’s not Comet’s killer feature.

Instead, it’s doing stuff with your tabs. Comet’s onboarding experience shows a few use cases like replying to emails and setting meetings, or filling an Instacart cart with the ingredients for butter chicken.

Just like Dia, when I first launched Comet, I was able to import my profiles from Arc, which included bookmarks and cookies. I was essentially still logged into all the apps and sites I was already logged into. So I tried an assistant experiment. 

One thing I often do is to look up the restaurants that have availability on OpenTable in Yelp. I tend to agree more with Yelpers who are usually harsher critics than OpenTable diners. So I asked Comet to “Find me the highest rated sushi restaurants in San Diego that have availability for 2 at 7pm next Friday night on OpenTable. Pick the top 10 and then rank them by Yelp rating.” And it worked! And if I really want to, I can say “Book Takaramono sushi” and it would have done so. (Actually, I did and then quickly canceled.)

I tried a different experiment which is something I heard Aravind Srinivas say in his interview with The Verge. I navigated to Gmail and checked three emails I wanted to unsubscribe to. I asked the assistant, “unsubscribe from the checked emails.” The agent then essentially took over my Gmail screen and opened the first checked email, clicked on the unsubscribe link. It repeated this process for the other two emails though ran into a couple of snags. First, Gmail doesn’t keep the state of the checked emails when you click into an email. But the Comet assistant was smart enough to remember the subject lines of all three emails. For the second email, it had some issues filing out the right email for the form so it didn’t work. Therefore of the three unsubscribes, it succeeded on two. 

The whole process also took about two minutes. It was wild though to see my Gmail being navigated by the machine. So that you know it’s in control, Comet puts a teal glow around the edges of the page, not dissimilar to the purple glow of the new Siri. And I could have stopped Comet at any time by clicking a stop button. Obviously, sitting there for two minutes and watching my computer unsubscribe to three emails is a lot longer than the 20 seconds it would have take me to do this manually, but like with many agents, the thinking is to delegate a process to it and come back later to check it. 

I Want My AI Browser

A couple hours after Perplexity launched Comet, Reuters published a leak with the headline “Exclusive: OpenAI to release web browser in challenge to Google Chrome.” Perplexity’s CEO seems to suggest that it was on purpose, to take a bit of wind from their sails. The Justice Department is still trying to strong-arm Google to divest itself from Chrome. If that happens, we’re talking about breaking the most profitable feedback loop in tech history. Chrome funnels search queries directly to Google, which powers their ad empire, which funds Chrome development. Break that cycle, and suddenly you’ve got independent Chrome that could default to any search engine, giving AI-first challengers like The Browser Company, Perplexity, and OpenAI a real shot at users.

Regardless of Chrome’s fate, I strongly believe that AI-enabled browsers are the future. Once I started chatting with my tabs, asking for summaries, seeking clarification, asking for too-technical content to be dumbed down to my level, I just can’t go back. The agentic stuff that Perplexity’s Comet is at the forefront of is just the beginning. It’s not perfect yet, but I think its utility will get there as the models get better. To quote Srinivas again:

I’m betting on the fact that in the right environment of a browser with access to all these tabs and tools, a sufficiently good reasoning model — like slightly better, maybe GPT-5, maybe like Claude 4.5, I don’t know — could get us over the edge where all these things are suddenly possible and then a recruiter’s work worth one week is just one prompt: sourcing and reach outs. And then you’ve got to do state tracking… That’s the extent to which we have an ambition to make the browser into something that feels more like an OS where these are processes that are running all the time.

It must be said that both Opera and Microsoft’s Edge also have AI built in. However, the way those features are integrated feel more like afterthoughts, the same way that Arc’s own AI features felt like tiny improvements.

The AI-powered ideas in both Dia and Comet are a step change. But the basics also have to be there, and in my opinion, should be better than what Chrome offers. The interface innovations that made Arc special shouldn’t be sacrificed for AI features. Arc is/was the perfect foundation. Integrate an AI assistant that can be personalized to care about the same things you do so its summaries are relevant. The assistant can be agentic and perform tasks for you in the background while you focus on more important things. In other words, put Arc, Dia, and Comet in a blender and that could be the perfect browser of the future.