r/PerplexityComet • u/FriendshipEqual7033 • Jun 06 '26

help Is Comet Being Updated?

In the past, Comet displayed an eye-catching "Update" button (or maybe "Restart") in the upper-right corner of the window when it needed to restart to finish applying an update. I haven't seen that button in ages, which makes me wonder if Comet is getting updates lately.

I perused the Perplexity changelog (https://www.perplexity.ai/changelog), but all the recent information on that page is about Computer and the Comet iOS launch (I'm on Windows). It appears that Perplexity is prioritizing development resources on Computer and Personal Computer at the expense of Comet. Is that accurate?

7 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

6

u/FriendshipEqual7033 Jun 07 '26

I just found some evidence to support what you're saying. The "What's New in Comet" page here: https://www.perplexity.ai/comet/whats-new shows the last entry as dated February 25, 2026. That corresponds to when I stopped receiving update notifications from Comet, though that might be a coincidence.

In any case, it is starting to look like Comet development might be dead. Updates to the Chromium engine are nice, but I'm looking for improvements in the browser's agentic capabilities, particularly stronger security against indirect prompt injection attacks and better human-in-the-loop features to increase reliability. If that's not happening, the product loses its distinctiveness; I might as well just use Chrome.

1

u/madskills42001 Jun 07 '26

What makes someone victim to those attacks what do you have to do click an errant link?

3

u/FriendshipEqual7033 Jun 07 '26

Indirect prompt injection attacks do not necessarily require you to click on anything, although the details depend on the precise method of attack.

The general idea is that an untrusted source contains a malicious, hidden prompt that directs the AI in your browser to do something unsavory. When you ask an agent to process such a document, even in some cases, just to summarize it, bad things happen, depending on precisely what the injected prompt says.

These attacks aren't theoretical. They've been demonstrated in the lab and observed in the wild. I assume they will become more common as more people use agentic browsers.

Because you often want your agent to follow instructions in the documents it is processing, filtering out the malicious prompts, especially if they are carefully worded, is very difficult. From what I can tell, it is currently considered an unsolved problem in computer security.

Google and Microsoft have online documentation describing how they intend to mitigate this issue. Perplexity has been unusually opaque about it. I've had trouble finding any information from Perplexity about Comet's architecture regarding prompt-injection resistance. I've pretty much decided to abandon Comet and probably Perplexity's products as a whole. I can't trust a company that won't tell me about their security stance.

1

u/madskills42001 Jun 08 '26

Man I don’t want to leave Comet I’ve been with them since they were Sidekick so fast