Comet by Perplexity – Will AI reinvent the web browser?
The News
After The Browser Company abandoned its beloved browser Arc, it introduced its second browser Dia, with a heavy focus on AI features, however, with Comet entering the field of AI-first browsers, it will be interesting to see how Perplexity and The Browser Company are interpreting the reinvention of the web browser.
My Thoughts
When The Browser Company introduced Arc, I got excited. Browsers haven't changed much over the past decade, and suddenly a new company emerges, that creates and designs a product in a realm where changing a couple of icons, corner radii, and some colors is the ultimate feeling of design improvements. Arc felt like a fresh breeze. A much needed one. After using it for a couple of weeks, then months, I fell in love with having my opened tabs neatly organized vertically in a sidebar, with the possibility to create folders for further structure, as well as viewing two websites in a split-view, and creating dedicated workspaces for different projects. But suddenly, The Browser Company felt weird. The updates did no longer feel as exciting as they used to, and they doubled-down on questionable AI-powered features.
What felt super off, was Arc Search, especially its 'Browse for Me' feature, which scouted the web, read multiple pages, and built a dedicated tab for you. I don't know if I'm the only one, but those are the things I enjoy most when using browsers. This is what makes the web fun, browsing around, reading pages, discovering things, or researching. Why would I hand over the tasks that I enjoy most doing to AI? More importantly, and this is also why Arc Search was under fire, as it scouted the web and read multiple pages, it created a new page or tab that summarized all the information gathered from those sites, completely cutting out the original creators of those information, who are sometimes relying on site visitors because of sponsored content, ads, or affiliate links. Arc Search simply bypassed them. This feels just wrong. And it's also the reason I lost any interest in what The Browser Company is doing, for example its new browser Dia.
AI is an exciting technology that brings loads of opportunities, but they are companies that used that technology to create a lot of harm, plagiarize what people carefully and thoughtfully created as part of their work, and then just take that to earn a fortune. This kind of attitude is dangerous.
And a product that introduces a feature that screams 'We don't care about the original creators' isn't reinventing the web or how we searching or browsing through it. It makes it a worse place.
Now, here comes Perplexity, the company that did loads of unethical shit to create an "answer engine" as a Google Search competitor. But while Google Search (while questionable how ethical that one is) results sent traffic to sources, after scraping them and the work done by journalists and creators, Perplexity said "F that" by providing an answer rather than pointing people to click through to a primary source, so it can starve the primary source of ad revenue, while keeping that revenue for themselves. But it didn't end there. Perplexity created a Page product, which creates a summary based on those sources. And it's not quoting a sentence, but rather creating a completely aggregated post, actively plagiarizing the sources it used.
The Verge reported back in June 2024, that Forbes discovered Perplexity was dodging the publication's hard paywall in order to provide a summary of an investigation the publication did of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt's drone company. A thorough investigation by WIRED confirmed the finding by Robb Knight, that Perplexity has been ignoring the robots.txt code that explicitly asks web crawlers to not scrape the page. When Perplexity's CEO Aravind Srinivas got confronted with that, he said that Perplexity wasn't ignoring robots.txt, it was just using third-party scrapers that ignored it. Mh, when getting confronted with something you did wrong, it's the easiest thing to just point to someone else.
Perplexity is at the forefront of shattering the foundations of trust that built the internet.
And now, it's building a browser, the piece of software that gives users access to the internet. As an optimist, I hope for the better. But as a realist, seeing a company like Perplexity entering the browser market, I expect the worst.
Conclusion
While every new technology holds on to the potential of creating loads of new opportunities, we mostly got confronted with the things AI, and the major companies leveraging the technology, got wrong. Instead of focusing on a beloved product (the thing you are hoping for as a company building software) The Browser Company abandoned Arc to double-down on AI and build Dia. Instead of providing an ethical way while summarizing the content human-beings created and are relying on to support their work, Perplexity decided to bypass and screw them, take what they created to make a fortune, and dodge established principles that hold up the web. And now it wants to build a browser, too.
Based on Perplexity's past and its CEO's behaviors, looking ahead I try to prepare myself for the worst. We should care about the web, and the foundations that created trust, but also were responsible for the good things about the internet. The main question I'm asking myself is if any of Perplexity's users or investors care about that too, or if they're blinded by the sensationalism that is fueling all the innovation Perplexity is bringing to our world.
Till next time! 👋
Support: Do you have a friend who is looking for inspiration, news about design, and useful tools and apps? Forward this newsletter to a friend or simply share this issue and show some support. You can also show some love by simply clicking the button down below and keep this newsletter a sustainable side-project by buying me a coffee. ☕️ 🥰