This new AI browser is what Comet and Dia should have been

I’ve spent the last few months trying to make Comet and Dia work for me. I really did. Installed them on my main machine, kept them as default for weeks at a time, and tried to route actual work through them. Both had moments that felt promising, but neither ever became something I reached for without thinking twice. The agent features felt bolted on, the interfaces never quite clicked, and at the end, I just ended up using Chrome with Gemini.

So when Aside popped up in my feed today, I was skeptical but curious enough to give it a shot. The launch post from the founder made the usual claims about vertical tabs, a polished “Liquid Glass” look, local privacy, and strong agent performance.

What stood out more was that they’d open-sourced their benchmark results showing the agent hitting 297 out of 300 tasks on the Online-Mind2Web suite. Numbers like that are easy to dismiss until you actually try the thing.

So of course, I downloaded it to see what it’s all about. The setup process will take a couple of minutes or so, but it’s straightforward. 

You need to sign in to an account to begin. After that, it asked for a password to encrypt everything locally, then offered to pull in history, cookies, and bookmarks from Safari, Comet, and ChatGPT Atlas (some of the many browsers I’ve got set up).

After that it walked through what the agent could actually do: handle tasks across tabs, sign in where needed while keeping credentials local, and let me use whatever AI subscription I already pay for. I went with the built-in Aside plan that combines a couple frontier models.

Once I was in, the vertical tab layout on the left felt immediately more natural than the horizontal mess most browsers still use (I’m unapologetically biased here). I spent a few minutes using it to dig into the benchmark repo, cross-check some of the task results, and even pull together notes for this piece. It handled the research side without me having to constantly copy-paste or switch windows.

Digging through Jun’s posts, the more interesting bit is that Aside seems built for people who already live inside AI/dev workflows, not just casual browsing. He says it ships from v1.0 with CLI, MCP support, and skills, so you can kick off browser-agent sessions from the terminal, connect it to tools that support MCP, or control the browser through a REPL instead of treating it like another AI sidebar.

Chanhee also showed a Codex-powered example where Aside browsed logged-in X, searched a topic, filtered hundreds of posts/replies, and turned the results into a structured summary. That sounds niche, but it’s exactly the kind of messy, account-bound web research most AI browsers still struggle with.

Jun also pointed to small workflow touches like popover approval prompts, so agents don’t sit idle for hours after a missed notification.

That said, I’m not ready to call it a game changer yet. During my brief testing, it felt a touch sluggish with just a few tabs open, and my M2 Air got warmer than usual. I was also running a background task in Hermes at the same time, so it’s possible the heat and lag weren’t entirely on Aside, but it’s worth noting. I’ll need to live in it properly for a few more weeks and put it through real workflows to see if the promise holds up once the novelty wears off.

There are a few other rough edges that the team needs to iron out. And it looks like they’re actively listening to early testers. For instance, they’ve confirmed that they’re working on making new tabs open at the top of the list instead of the bottom.

They also reset usage limits for folks on the Aside subscription plans because they found a bug in usage limit calculations.

So overall, the first impression is better than what I got from Comet or Dia after much longer trials. The combination of an actual browser that feels designed for agent use, rather than a wrapper around one, plus the fact that the team is shipping real benchmark data instead of just marketing slides, gives it more credibility than most of these projects. I’m keeping it installed for now.

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