Chrome for Sale? What 2 Months Testing AI Browsers Taught Me About Perplexity's $34.5B Bet
Perplexity’s AI Browser Bet
Perplexity (valued at $18B) just made an offer to buy Chrome (valued at $20-50B) from Google for $34.5B. “Analysts say the (FTC) judge is unlikely to force the company to sell Chrome, though he gave little indication of which way he was leaning.”
Perplexity is making a big bet on browsers. Founder Aravind Srinivas said, “The browser is bigger than chat. It’s a more sticky product, and it’s the only way to build agents. It’s the only way to build end-to-end ‘workflows’.” The agent-in-browser approach, as Srinivas argues in this post by Nadeem Sawar, is more familiar and flexible than the chatbot UX favored by ChatGPT and Claude. To be honest, I agree. However, that’s not what the flagship batch of AI Browsers are offering.
AI Browser feature sets
I’ve been investigating AI browsers for the past two months, having spent 3 weeks with Dia from The Browser Company (the same company that built Arc) and now taking Perplexity’s browser, Comet, out for a spin. Dia and Comet are essentially browsers with chatboxes strapped to their sides that let you query a page, search for more resources, or perform tasks on the page.
Comet’s assistant is like ChatGPT’s Agent and Google’s Project Mariner—just in the browser. It can navigate around a page for you, but it still gets stuck in places that a human might not, and it has to wade through UI when an API call might have been more efficient. I’m still using my MCP servers in Claude for I/O-heavy apps like Notion.
What makes Comet stand out is Perplexity’s algorithm. It is the leader when it comes to discernment (choosing which URLs are most relevant to a query) and formulating thoughtful responses using the latest information gleaned from the web (which is problematic in its own right, but I’m saving that for a future issue).
The shared “killer feature” between these two browsers is the ability to save prompts you want to reuse with different web pages as “skills” in Dia or “shortcuts” in Comet. I even did a tutorial on how to port them from one to the other.
Will AI Browser prompts replace extensions?
Nadeem argued that skills/shortcuts will replace extensions. Average users indeed have no way to identify when a browser extension might be harvesting their data or stealing revenue from affiliate programs (see also PayPal’s Honey scandal). I’ve also been able to recreate several utilities with a short prompt that I usually use an extension for, such as cleaning up copy. Heck, Dia has a skill for looking up coupon codes, no theft from creators required!
But the prompt library interfaces of both Comet and Dia are rough around the edges—I wasn’t able to find out how to edit saved prompts in Comet, and Dia’s UI isn’t as polished. In the end, the feature could be easily copied by a lead browser with an LLM to sell and hungry PMs looking to ship a feature in time for bonus season (looking at you, Edge).
Is Chrome going to get bought?
Rumor has it that Perplexity's bid is likely a publicity stunt (I mean, I'm writing about it, aren't I?) Although Perplexity’s funders say they’ll pay up for the deal if it goes through, it would be likely that Google would not go quietly into that dark night. Chrome is often the first app people install on a new device, an OS inside your OS, and the Omnibox (used for typing URLs and search terms) is crucial real estate for Google, which is already losing search traffic to the likes of Perplexity. Losing control of Chrome would be Very Bad for the company.
And perhaps that’s why we haven’t seen Chrome launching any prompt libraries or Assistants of its own. Why invest in something you might have to turn around and give to your competition?
Perhaps Google is holding its breath and waiting for this to pass. Meanwhile, AI Browsers keep evolving…
Psst! Are you into AI Browsers as much as I am? I made a YouTube channel just for my livestream recordings where I experiment with AI Browsers. Check it out, and feel free to drop me a line or comment with how you’re using them!