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Comet looks more promising due to Perplexity’s superior assistant, integration capabilities, and stronger monetization strategy.
Dia relies heavily on OpenAI (and other AI wrappers), requiring that they level-up Dia with "skills" (premade prompts), which while cool, it does make me wonder how sustainable it is versus Perplexity as a whole who is leading in AI search.
We believe there are better options available in this category, read below to learn what this software does well, and what they could do better. ⤵
Comet has more promise at the moment. With Perplexity at the core, integration with email and calendar, plus the ability to actually take over and click around for you, makes Comet feel a bit more futuristic as to what a browser can be.
Comet can interact with open tabs, clean up and group tabs, similarly to Dia. That said, Comet allows you to actually talk with your browser via a voice assistant, and even navigate the pages your on at times, showing you a deeper layer of browser interaction that you don't get with Dia.
Right now Dia allows you to reference your history with @history, allowing it to go a bit deeper on personalization based on your prior searches and pages visited. Comet doesn't go too deep into history or memory as of now, bup Perplexity has said that they are diving more into memory in the future (which will make its way into Comet).
Dia has skills that you can trigger with /skillname which are effectively pre-set prompting before a search is sent or chat is completed. They also have a marketplace where you can grab these skills (prompts) and modify them for your own usage. It's definitely a standout feature.
Perplexity knows how to make money and has way more resources, so I believe they'll actually have a sustainable business model (they already do). That means they'll be able to do more and figure out how to monetize the browser effectively.
Perplexity is a search engine that's already good, and I use it alongside ChatGPT. Dia is mostly using an OpenAI wrapper (and Anthropic) for their search, so I'm just generally less bullish because I find myself missing both Perplexity and ChatGPT when using Dia, they just have less IP as a whole.
With all of that said, Perplexity is already a fantastic search engine. So taking that and building a browser around it makes a lot of sense. In-fact, it's getting me even more excited for OpenAI's upcoming browser as they are leading the charge when it comes to chat and search.
I'm unsure if just pure product and design quality can win in this space. Love how Dia looks and the team behind it is exceptional, just not totally sure if it's enough being more of a wrapper of these other AI tools at the core.
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A browser for agentic search by Perplexity.
Comet Browser is an upcoming Browser built by the team behind Perplexity (one of the most promising search-focused AI teams right now).
What they realized is that web browsers are at the core of search, so what if they built a browser that has their AI search at the core? Might sound familiar to The Browser Company's thesis with their new upcoming Dia Browser, but Perplexity is quite a bit larger and has had more success in the search space, taking nearly 2% of global search traffic.
Perplexity has something up their sleeve with Comet though, and it's all around their Assistant.
Comet's built-in assistant is what sets it apart from all the best browsers we've covered. It handles the new table-stakes well, with Perplexity at the core, so all the usual search and research functionality is handled.
It can also interact with open tabs, allowing you to essentially target your search and research to a more specific dataset to what you're looking into. But Dia can do this as well, so it's not particularly standout in a browser.
But what does set it apart is Comet gives us the first actual glance at what this coveted "Agentic Browsing" experience actually is, in a non-technical, actually user-friendly way.
What does this mean? Well it can connect into your calendar and email to tell you about important emails (cool, like Google Assistant, right?), but most impressively it can even navigate the web for you.
I'm saying that you can ask it to do things, and it will actually navigate around the page your on, open new pages when needed, and take action as if it's a human you're asking to do something for you.
With all of that said, moving into the browser space is incredibly difficult, but there is something incredibly interesting about this new wave of AI browsers, and we're totally here for the browser space to finally evolve.
AI won’t exist as an app. Or a button. It’ll be an entirely new environment — built on top of a web browser.
Dia Browser is the latest project from The Browser Company (the same team behind Arc Browser), and while it’s an interesting experiment, it feels more like a stripped-down Chrome with an AI sidekick than an actual serious browser contender.
Dia is for those who are super excited about agentic browsers (think of a baked-in AI chat sidebar, that can co-pilot the browser with you at times).
If you're someone that likes the idea of being able to have pre-built prompts that can be ran that interact with and take into consideration the content on the page you're visiting, then you'll love their "Skills" functionality (this will either immediately click for you as to what's possible, or not):
Sorta. The main competition going on right now is between Perplexity's Comet vs Dia. And while I see some promise behind Dia, I am definitely finding myself only using it for some personal searching. Like going in the depths on researching to buy something. It hasn't been able to replace Arc Browser as my day-to-day work and productivity-focused browser.
It's also incredibly difficult for me to break the habit (or even want to) use ChatGPT less (I use the desktop app, triggering it with CTRL + spacebar), and it seems the team really wants you to embrace their AI chatbot in-place of ChatGPT to get the full benefits (of getting your browser to learn and understand you.
With all of that, if you’re someone who just wants a clean browser with built-in AI to summarize articles or answer questions, speak to your open tabs and YouTube videos to help with research, then sure, Dia might be worth giving a shot. But if you actually care about productivity, speed, and having real control over your setup, Arc still feels lightyears ahead (yes, even in maintenance mode). It's clear that Dia was built for a totally different audience (e.g. my parents or those who haven't taken to embracing AI just yet, then absolutely yes, Dia feels like a solid gateway into this).
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