The difference starts with how these AI features work. Chrome, Safari and Edge now offer AI tools, whether it’s Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot or Apple’s on-device intelligence coming later this year. But these tools sit on top of the browser, not inside it. You still load a page, click through it, scroll and fill things out yourself. The AI can summarize a site, answer questions or help refine a search, but it can’t take any actions. These are legacy browsers with AI added.

That’s the key distinction. AI-first browsers like Comet and Atlas can take action. At your command, they can take on an AI agent role, including filling out forms, shopping, putting a presentation together based on your open tabs and much more. But at this early stage, actions can go wrong. All AI programs still hallucinate by making assumptions and filling in gaps for missing information. It can be like asking your kids to go to the store and never being 100% sure with what they’ll come back with. Developers are working on solving this problem, among others, and AI is becoming more reliable.

Whether that approach will hold up remains a question. When companies build new features onto old foundations, things can get messy. Anyone who has used enterprise software that’s grown for a decade (Salesforce and Microsoft’s CRM come to mind) knows how complicated a once-simple tool can become when too much gets bolted on. Browsers are heading toward the same point. Fitting AI into a structure designed long before AI existed may not be the smoothest long-term path.

That’s why Atlas and Comet feel like a glimpse of the future.

Because it runs on Perplexity, the AI platform designed for research and reasoned thinking, Comet is especially good at gathering information from multiple sites, keeping context across tabs, generating comparisons and showing its sources. If you’re planning a trip, gathering sources for a research project, evaluating options or pulling information together from several places, Comet is built for that. But it’s still early. It can misread buttons, stall on dynamic pages or summarize with gaps. 

Atlas focuses more on completing tasks. You tell it what you want, and it tries to carry out the steps. Because it connects directly to ChatGPT, it benefits from OpenAI’s strongest models, though the more advanced features require a subscription. Like Comet, Atlas can break if a website’s layout shifts or a button is labeled in an unexpected way. It’s fast, capable and promising, but you still need to check its work.

Neither of these browsers should replace your main one. Chrome, Safari and Edge are still the most stable place for banking, shopping, travel bookings and anything involving personal information. But adding an AI-first browser as a complement to your main browser can save time on lower-risk projects that involve tedious steps: collecting research, comparing options, filling out nonsensitive forms or navigating long online processes.

But if you prefer to stay AI-free, there’s a new browser that launched just last week called Orion. It’s a privacy-first browser built by Kagi that blocks trackers by default, supports both Chrome and Safari extensions and avoids embedding any AI features at all. You may recall that in September, the first AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign was discovered by Anthropic in which its AI platform Claude was used to build and deploy a cyberattack. Orion comes at a time when concerns around AI privacy and security are running high. Right now it’s only available on iOS and macOS, but a Windows version is in development. For anyone who wants a modern browser without AI in the background, Orion is a good choice.

AI-first browsing is still new, but it shows a different vision from the retrofitted approach the big players are taking. For now, the safest strategy is to use both: Keep your main browser for everyday work, and bring in an AI-first one when you have a task that requires deep research or a digital assistant to help complete.

Leslie Meredith has been writing about technology for more than a decade. As a mom of four, value, usefulness and online safety take priority. Have a question? Email Leslie at asklesliemeredith@gmail.com.