A Comet Approaches Planet Browser Company
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
If you have followed me for a bit, you know that I really love the work that The Browser Company has done with Arc. They built a browser that is ridiculously powerful, infinitely customizable, and even extended their ambitions to mobile with one of the nicest AI search tools. But something happened last fall that began to make me question my commitment to Arc. The company decided to pivot and refocus the vast majority of their efforts on a new browser called Dia. Dia looks very different from Arc, the product that has brought them recognition and a loyal user base. The new browser is all about AI and agentic usage of your web tools. To be clear, it is a great idea and I think they’ll make a great product. But it continues to baffle myself and others that they have chosen to branch off instead of building upon their established product. The Browser Company is much smaller than many other AI startups, but it is scrappy. Really cool folks work there and they are awfully creative. That being said, the shift in focus clearly came with a massive risk. One that finally reared its head this week when Perplexity announced they too were building an AI web browser.
Perplexity is one of my favorite AI products. The search engine is tremendously useful for research. The company is growing, has raised tons of money from the biggest names, and moves at breakneck speed. They are not a competitor that is going to go easy on anyone. The new browser that Perplexity is building is called Comet. One can surmise from their marketing materials that Comet is going to be very similar to Dia from a functionality standpoint. Agentic browsers are obviously going to be a big thing, but Perplexity has so many advantages in this fight that I struggle to see how The Browser Company succeeds with Dia. Particularly after having abandoned their original claim to fame and having burned some loyal users who wanted to continue to see Arc flourish. The Browser Company’s biggest advantages were their taste and their willingness to be quirky. Those have sort of been thrown out the window in this scenario. They may be an advantage over Google or Mozilla, but Perplexity also has amazing design chops and has been trying all sorts of things. I can’t forget to mention that The Browser Company’s founding designer Nate Parrott, who has seemed to be a major part of Arc’s success, left to join Anthropic. We learned of this news on the same day that Perplexity announced Comet. Those are a devastating combination.
One thing I have not mentioned is that there is no reason not to believe that OpenAI or Anthropic could launch their own web browsers at some point. They both offer tools that can control a web browser in Operator and Computer use respectively. Why not just own the whole stack if you can? While you can make the case that these two entering the space would also be major challenges for Comet, Perplexity is already big and much more established in the marketplace than The Browser Company. When Jensen Huang is specifically shouting you out on stage, you’re in a winning position. If Perplexity can carve out space alongside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and others as a dedicated search tool, they can probably do the same with web browsers. Another advantage Perplexity has is their own series of AI models that are custom tailored to searching the web and at the moment, they seem to be the best at it.
Google is going to eventually integrate these types of features into Chrome, which is of course the biggest browser. But there are niches to be won. I suspect that the niche The Browser Company was gunning for with Dia, is going to be won over by Comet. I would love for them to focus on Arc again and own the productivity browser space, but Silicon Valley’s occasionally toxic growth mindset calls I suppose.