Perplexity Comet | Hacker News Reader

Perplexity Comet

comet.perplexity.ai

43 pointsbirriel55 comments

I have a year subscription with perplexity and use it everyday for search. Honest reaction from getting started page demos for comet “I would not want that”

yeah I explicitly do not want my searches "tailored" to me. I want factual results that I can explore and pick holes in.

I want it to be a trustworthy tool, not a companion.

You should check out kagi then

http://kagi.com/

The next service I will give my money is going to be Kagi since they seem to tick all the right boxes (for now) :)

AI-based chromium forks are becoming as common as AI-based visual studio code forks. I wouldn't be surprised if AI-based Linux distros started becoming popular too. Seems the ideal workflow is to fork off of existing open-source solutions, add paid features and lock behind paywall, make profit.

I want more Webkit forks rather than more Chromium forks. That battery life is critical for me on my Mac and I think Webkit returning to Windows would be interesting too!

anything but chromium forks. i want real competition in the browser engine space

I thought the battery-life meme was a myth? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41542413

Have you checked out Orion? It is WebKit based.

[1] https://kagi.com/orion/

I've been using Dia for about a month. Dia is made by The Browser Company of New York, best known for the Arc browser [1].

Dia is a fabulous piece of work--it's much more than Chrome + a chatbot.

You can tell they thought deeply what would it mean for AI to be integrated into a browser, not just tacked on.

It's still in beta, but even at this stage, it's quite polished.

The custom skills are a killer feature. You'll wonder why every browser doesn't have it [2][3].

[1]: https://www.diabrowser.com

[2]: https://www.caneraras.com/learn/browser-skills-gallery

[3]: "Dia Browser Review in 120 seconds: The AI-First Browser Reimagining Web Interaction" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VijHiDCU4zc

Am I overlooking something or is this just a link to a waitlist? There isn't actually a release yet, right?

correct unless you are on the perplexity max plan

Excited for this & curious how it will compare with Dia.

Launch site feels busy, though.

As far as I know, Dia have a waiting list atm?

This has to be among the least informative landing pages I've seen yet. Vague marketing woo, giant hero images, scroll hijacking, sound effects, and zero screenshots.

They literally have a sliding section taking up significant scroll height that's dedicated to our solar system, and when I clicked one of the planets, expecting it to maybe reveal a usage example—I did actually get a full spiel about Mars, with still no hint of the product.

This page was better https://www.perplexity.ai/comet/gettingstarted

Cautiously optimistic that Browser Wars 2 will right many wrongs. Chrome is so bloated now.

Don't expect these companies to be interested in the actual browser / DOM rendering technologies and the betterment of standards. They'll be run of the mill Chromium forks.

Is there a simple english summary of what this is and what it does before I download it?

this is a much better page about it imo https://www.perplexity.ai/comet/gettingstarted

Holds up a mirror to the uselessness of modern human existence.

What are we doing here?

Automated trekking bag purchasing.

A "new" browser in the '20s is the equivalent of a browser toolbar in the '00s. It's not a product, it's a feature.

IMO, we're back to the late 90s when every kid (I was one of them) would slap the IE ActiveX control onto a VB6 form and call it a browser.

What a fucking awful website what the fuck is happening when I tried to scroll?

This https://www.perplexity.ai/comet/gettingstarted should be the home page, the current homepage should be somewhere else, you want to quickly introduce the app / service and answer the visitors first question, "what is this?"

Instead the home page hijacked my scrollbar and walked me through Perplexitys core values, principles and then introduced the whole planetary system before ending up in a FAQ!? Wth

Team Perplexity, you can do better than this, your business is all about distilling fluff into concrete answers, your website should portray the same message, this does not

is that the spyware browser?

Is there a non-spyware browser? holy shit!

IceCat.

Firefox + arkenfox (https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js)

Ungoogled Chromium (https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

Tor Browser (https://www.torproject.org/download/)

a landing page about a new browser and then...

> Venus is brilliant in our sky, but brutal up close. Once possibly Earth-like, it fell into a runaway greenhouse state. Now it simmers under acid clouds, its surface hot enough to melt lead. It spins backward, slowly and strangely, like a world rewound in time.

a bunch of facts about planets?

i use perplexity all of the time and think its a good product but this page is baffling to me

i use perplexity all of the time and think its a good product but this page is baffling to me

Well, it's right there in the name: Perplexity.

Finally, some truth in marketing!

The scroll hijacking on this site itself erodes my trust in this being a browser I want to use because it demonstrates a lack of understanding of the web.

and it's playing sound effects on button mouseovers? boooo.

Yeah, I can’t believe this is a serious website made by a multi million dollar company. It looks like something I would have designed when I was 10.

Scroll hijacking is the worst. Makes everything feel sluggish and unresponsive. Instantly gives me the urge to close out the tab.

I'm rooting for Ladybird[1], a brand-new browser from scratch, backed by a non-profit.

[1] https://ladybird.org

It's time to wreak havoc on the back orifice of existing solutions.

It's a nice idea, but it is still pretty far from even a public v0.1. I think they can get there, but it will be at least a few years.

OpenAI Reaponse: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/openai-releas...

> OpenAI's browser is built atop Chromium, Google's own open-source browser code, two of the sources said.

Isn't Perplexitys Comet also built ontop of Chromium?

oh, it will be groundbreaking.... eeeeeeee nooooo.

Solve the captcha/scraping problem by scraping directly in the browser. Genius

Scrolljacking aside, why do the images on the page have the trademark yellow hue from ChatGPT generated images?

is this a real innovation in the browser UX, or just a ploy to vacuum up as much data as possible?

you can never trust VC backed startups to do things for the users' net benefit

The later

Comet, Arc, and these other challenger browsers will hopefully light a fire under Google

> light a fire under Google

Do you feel Chrome has been under-delivering?

I see frequent and visible feature changes. I do wish Project Mariner wasn't limited to their Ultra tier.

Yeah I do, but more for its bloat and the erosion of search quality.

What do you think this browser will be built on-top of?

Yeah the problem with Chrome is it doesn't have enough AI shit crammed into it.

Arc has been abandoned.

Nobody seen that coming

Interesting, it has? The hype has died out but I see it in the wild

They pivoted to "AI": https://browsercompany.substack.com/p/letter-to-arc-members-...

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