Sidekick Browser Shut Down? Get Its Workspaces in Chrome (2026)

Sidekick, the productivity browser known for its workspace sidebar and Sessions, sunset on August 3, 2025. Perplexity acquired the team in May 2025 and folded it into Comet, its AI browser. As of June 2026, meetsidekick.com redirects to comet.perplexity.ai. There is no standalone Sidekick and no sign of a revival.

Key takeaways

• Sidekick sunset August 3, 2025, roughly three months after Perplexity acquired the team in May 2025; the domain now redirects to Comet.
• Comet is not a continuation of Sidekick’s tab workflow. It is an AI-assistant browser with a different purpose.
• Sidekick’s signature Sessions and workspace sidebar map onto Chrome with SuperchargeNavigation: named workspaces, automatic snapshots, an Alt+K command bar, all free and local.

If you used Sidekick, you remember the left rail of Sessions, the workspace separation, the app-launcher tucked into the sidebar. It was Chromium underneath, so it felt like Chrome with a sharper organizational skin on top. Then it went quiet, the subscription prompts stopped making sense, and the site started pointing somewhere else. You are not looking for a new browser to learn. You want the workflow back without that.

What Happened to Sidekick

Sidekick was built by a team led by Dmitry Pushkarev, a former Amazon engineer. It launched as a Chromium productivity browser whose pitch was focus: a sidebar of Sessions and workspaces instead of an ever-growing horizontal tab strip, plus integrated app shortcuts so your tools sat one click away.

The timeline that ended it is short. In May 2025, Perplexity acquired the Sidekick team. Perplexity launched Comet, its own AI-assistant browser, in July 2025. Sidekick itself sunset on August 3, 2025 — roughly three months after the acquisition and the last point at which it functioned as a maintained product. The original meetsidekick.com address now returns a permanent redirect to comet.perplexity.ai, which is how you can confirm the handoff yourself.

There had been an earlier, messier shutdown notice. Sidekick floated a “sunset by end of 2024” message, then was still operational and still taking Pro subscriptions into January 2025, which left lifetime-deal buyers on AppSumo openly skeptical about whether any shutdown was real. The August 3, 2025 sunset, tied to the Perplexity acquisition, is the one that stuck.

As of June 2026, nothing suggests a comeback. The team is at Perplexity, the app is gone, and the domain points to a different product. Treat Sidekick as discontinued, not paused.

Why Comet Isn’t the Same Thing

Perplexity’s Comet inherited the Sidekick team, but it did not inherit Sidekick’s job. Comet is an AI-assistant browser. You give it broad instructions (“book a table”, “summarize these tabs”) and it runs multi-step tasks through a conversational layer. That is a different product category from “a sidebar that organizes my tabs into named contexts.”

If what you valued in Sidekick was the Sessions list and the workspace sidebar — a place to keep Work tabs and Personal tabs and a research project from bleeding into each other — Comet does not replace that. It is solving a different problem. So the practical question for a Sidekick refugee is not “is Comet good,” it is “where do my Sessions and workspaces live now.”

The answer, for most people, is plain Chrome plus one extension. Sidekick was Chromium already, so you lose nothing structural by moving to Chrome: same engine, same extension support, same enterprise compatibility. You rebuild the sidebar on top.

What Sidekick Did vs What Chrome Needs to Match It

Here is the feature-by-feature map from Sidekick’s organizational layer to where each piece lives in Chrome.

Two rows there are real gaps. Sidekick’s app sidebar — Gmail, Notion, Slack pinned as first-class icons — does not have a one-to-one extension. You approximate it with bookmarks or installed PWAs, which is clunkier. And Sidekick’s bundled blocking is not part of a workspace extension; that is a separate tool if you want it. Everything in the “Yes” rows, though, maps cleanly.

Rebuilding Sessions and Workspaces in Chrome

For the core of Sidekick — Sessions and the workspace sidebar — SuperchargeNavigation is the closest single-extension match. It is v1.3.0 on the Chrome Web Store as of June 2026, free, with no account.

Workspaces replace the workspace sidebar. Each workspace holds its own tabs, independently. Switching workspaces switches the whole context, not a filter view: you see only the active workspace’s tabs, exactly the separation Sidekick’s sidebar gave you between Work, Personal, and a project. Workspace state is stored locally. If you want it on a second machine, you opt into Chrome’s own account sync and the data rides your Google account, not a SuperchargeBrowser server.

Automatic snapshots replace Sessions. Sidekick’s Sessions let you save a named tab set and reopen it. SuperchargeNavigation covers this from two angles. Named workspaces are the deliberate, persistent version. On top of that, the extension snapshots your tab state automatically every 5 minutes and keeps a rolling history of up to 50 snapshots (about the last four hours), so even a Session you never explicitly saved is recoverable. If Chrome crashes or you close a workspace by accident, you rewind to an earlier state instead of rebuilding it by hand.

The command bar replaces quick search. Sidekick leaned on fast keyboard search to jump around. SuperchargeNavigation opens a command bar with Alt+K that searches across open tabs. Type a fragment of a title, arrow to it, Enter. If you had Sidekick muscle memory for not reaching for the mouse, this is the closest equivalent.

Peek replaces glance-style previews. Alt+Click any link to open it in an inline overlay without adding a tab to your current workspace. Dismiss it and you are back where you were. Good for checking a link mid-task without polluting a clean Session.

The whole thing is local by default: no account to create, no telemetry sent, your workspace names and URLs stay on your machine unless you deliberately turn on Chrome sync.

Vertical Tabs: Native Chrome vs the Extension

One piece of Sidekick’s look — the vertical list of tabs down the side — Chrome now does on its own. Chrome 146 shipped native vertical tabs (still flag-gated through 149). If a left-hand tab list was the only thing you wanted from Sidekick, enable that and stop there; no extension required.

What native vertical tabs do not include is the rest of the Sidekick model: workspace isolation, saved Sessions, search across tabs, snapshot recovery. The native strip reorganizes one window’s tabs vertically. It does not give you switchable named contexts. That gap is exactly where a workspace extension still earns its place. SuperchargeNavigation’s side panel uses Chrome’s side panel API, a separate surface from the native vertical strip, so the two run together without conflict if you want both.

What You Won’t Get Back

Be clear-eyed about the parts that don’t transfer cleanly. Sidekick’s integrated app sidebar — your key web apps pinned as sidebar icons with their own counters — has no direct extension equivalent. Bookmarks and installed PWAs get you most of the way functionally, but not as one tidy rail. Sidekick’s bundled blocking is also gone from this picture; a workspace extension is not an ad blocker, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

And no extension fully reproduces the feeling of a purpose-built shell. Sidekick was a whole browser designed around its sidebar. An extension lives inside Chrome’s side panel rather than replacing the browser chrome. The function is there; the seamlessness of a ground-up design is not.

If those specific things were the entire reason you used Sidekick, factor that in before you decide.

Where to Land

If you only wanted the vertical tab list, enable Chrome 146’s native vertical tabs and you are done.

If you wanted the workspace sidebar and Sessions — the actual reason most people picked Sidekick — stay on Chrome and add SuperchargeNavigation. You keep your extensions and profiles, you rebuild named workspaces and automatic Session recovery, and you get an Alt+K command bar and link peek on top, free and local.

If your draw was Sidekick’s app-launcher sidebar or its AI direction specifically, Comet is the closer spiritual successor — different product, different tradeoffs, and a cloud-AI posture worth weighing against a local-first extension.

Sidekick is not coming back. The workflow it built around Sessions and workspaces, though, was never locked to Sidekick’s binary. It maps onto the browser you already have.