Everyone is talking about RockMelt, a new browser and company backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, which was made available in beta form yesterday.
It only makes sense – people’s usage of the web and its services have greatly changed over time. Without stating the obvious, it is much more interactive than the passive act of “browsing” in the past. And although it’s a brutally competitive market out there with the main contesters being Microsoft, Apple, Google and Mozilla… Shouldn’t we have a browser that reflects the evolution of Web?
Simply said, RockMelt is built for sharing – It is built around social networking. Not only do you log into your Facebook to begin with, but along the left hand side, runs a panel with all of your favourite friends and their latest updates. There is also a “Share” button on the top navigation that allows you to share any webpage or image with a simple click of your mouse.
Along the right hand side of the screen lies a bookmarking bar, but unlike bookmarks in previous browsers, RockMelt includes notifications every time new content has been added – reminding me of my Google Reader.
Hmm…
When I load Safari on my Mac, my current browser, often the first thing I do is open Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and Google Reader. So a simple browser that removes the X number of tabs I keep open throughout the course of a day, and presents them nicely into one browser sounds, well, brilliant.
But my dear co-workers and techies informed me that RockMelt isn’t a new concept. Flock, for example, a social web browser, has been around for some time, and Opera has an add on with a similar bookmark-syncing service called, “Opera Link.”
They posed a good question, too. Since RockMelt is based on Chromium, the same open source browser that Google Chrome is built upon, why isn’t it just a Chrome extension/toolbar instead of a completely separate browser? Packaging a toolbar as a standalone browser seems like overkill.
I agree. And we agree that RockMelt won’t oust any of the current browsers out there. But we want to know what you think. Is there room for another web browser, especially when mobile web is becoming more prominent?
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