All I wanted was a pair of New Balances. I was done trusting stylish influencers who swore Vans, Converse, and Allbirds were up to the challenge of walking 20,000 steps day in and day out. They are not. Fall is the season of holiday sales, so there’s no better time to shop… if you’re immune to being overwhelmed by modern day e-commerce.
Wouldn’t it be grand if I could skip all the fake deals and barely disguised ads, and have the internet find the best stuff for me? What if I could tell the internet my wish and have it granted?
Tech CEOs have been evangelizing that this is the future. Tell the bot what you want, kick up your feet, and let AI do the rest. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said on a podcast that one day, AI will be able to “use a computer as well as a human.” He’s far from the only executive touting that bots and agents might soon be better than we are at just about everything.
In the past few weeks, it’s become clear that browsers are the latest entrant in the AI arms race. We’re talking about things like Perplexity’s Comet, ChatGPT Atlas, and even Chrome — browsers that natively embed chatbots into the internet experience. The pitch is to reorient how we browse, to move us away from the search engines that have reigned for the past three decades. The central idea is the same as we’ve heard from all the other agents-all-the-way-down companies: AI will be just as good as you are at surfing the web. Possibly better.
Big, if true.
Right now, AI browsers come in two main flavors. There are your regular browsers that have an AI assistant stapled on in a collapsible window, such as Chrome with its Gemini features, or Edge with Copilot Mode. Then there are more specialized AI browsers, most notably ChatGPT Atlas, Perplexity’s Comet, and The Browser Company’s Dia. This second category often supplants your search bar with AI and sometimes includes an “agentic mode,” in which the AI can complete more complex, browser-related tasks for you. Theoretically, that includes helping you book reservations or add items to a shopping cart.
Evaluating AI browsers While AI browsers share a similar approach, they each have varying takes on the ideal web surfing experience. Some make you pay for certain features, and of course, there are differences in the underlying models. But this isn’t meant to be a ranking. For this piece, I’m evaluating whether AI browsers can currently deliver a better internet. So I decided to focus on three main criteria: When are AI browsers most useful? I’m looking to see which, if any, browsing tasks become easier or faster by adding AI.
How much prompt babying is needed? Theoretically, I shouldn’t have to craft an overly specific prompt or answer a zillion follow-ups to get the result I’m looking for. Google is good at figuring out what you meant to type — I expect the same from ChatGPT.
If there is an agent, do I trust it to complete tasks for me? The whole point of AI agents is to let them do things for me. You need high confidence that the results are trustworthy.
For testing, I decided on a few ground rules. I kept it to five browsers: Chrome, Edge, Atlas, Comet, and Dia. There are more available, but this felt like a representative mix of both AI browser categories from a variety of players in the field. I focused on desktop apps, and tried to make settings as uniform as possible: I generally instructed the AI browsers to keep answers snappy, shared my location information where possible, enabled memory settings, and described myself as a “tech journalist specializing in health and wearable tech.” I also approached testing from a variety of AI skill levels. What would results look like if I was a complete AI newbie versus someone more adept at prompting? Lastly, if I tried one task in a browser, I gave it a go in all the browsers, down to the same exact prompt.
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