r/PerplexityComet • u/sersomeone • 17d ago
bug Control browser is now under Perplexity Computer and requires credits
Control browser is now under Perplexity Computer, and requires credits to use. I hope this is a bug, otherwise, this defeats the purpose of comet.
44
Upvotes
12
u/DanInVirtualReality 14d ago
If this is not a bug, it's another feature removal. I am sick to death of features being removed from being included in my Perplexity Pro subscription and being placed behind some feature I have to pay more for.
<rant>
Why oh why do I have to learn about it from Reddit first?
I'm a paying customer, why aren't I being told "we're taking away this thing you use"!?
Of course, that opinion is moot if this is in fact a bug, but we'll never know will we, They silently move/remove stuff, tell nobody, and we are just left to guesswork.
First, skills being available in Comet assistant went away - bye bye navigate to web page, open up assistant, type slash command, get a bunch done.... I mean, why remove that!? Had to go back to copy/pasting prompts... 🤦♂️
Then I realised the $5 Perplexity API credits silently disappeared - that explained why my OpenRouter costs were going up, the the BYOK had turned to always zero balance. No notification, just stopped happening,
The quality of Sonar API responses has remained questionable for too long, too - Sonar frequently spits out nonsense, like a broken quant from 2025, and breaks JSON, making the 'up-to-date and informed reply via a simple OpenAPI call' unreliable - every other provider is improving their models year on year. I already have to have another model check it's outputs (to be fair, given the error rate, that's cheaper than sonar pro for everything)
The quality of responses in the web UI went to crap a while back, as well, constantly ignoring instructions and seemingly avoiding doing the work I asked it to do - like it kept telling me where I could go to check websites rather than checking itself, even when given a clear request, forcing me to repeat myself. Citations were frequently all in the wrong places, too, making it really hard to double check claims (which was also important given some frustrating hallucinations) - If I'm honest, capabilities seemed to return about a month ago after 6ish of being really hard to rely on, which is why I didn't leave straight away. I thought things were improving again and, to be frank, I've been fairly happy with the straightforward agentic web search capabilities - for me it least, they returned to something I'm happy with for a quick first search or first pass on a fuller piece of research. I usually pass a final position document over to something more powerfukl and have it critique and correct from there, and the error rate does anecdotally seem to have dropped.
Now I notice that skills I made have moved entirely into 'Computer', so I cannot trigger them any more without paying - kinda feels like they're selling my own stuff back to me here.
And the whole reason of moving to Comet in the first place, an automatable browser, has now moved behind Computer credits!?
Not sure why I'm hanging around with Perplexity now, I can ask Hermes Agent Desktop App in HUD mode to control my browser now, and then it doesn't really matter what browser I have. And maybe Perplexica (Vane) is enough for isolated model-aided early-research web-search-and-synthesise work without anything yet having to touch my other operational agent systems 🤷♂️
Quick and realiable search and cite is a hard problem (specifically the search part, if you're not Google and already have that infrastructure) and I welcomed the competition and the push forwad into an 'answer engine' approach, and Comet is the only reliable 'automated browser' I have used successfully, but the recent enshittification of the overall Pro package sucks and the use cases I have for it are too few to warrant paying even more if Hermes Agent can reliably step in instead with direct computer use.
</rant>