"RockMelt Browser: A New Way to Surf Internet?"
"RockMelt Browser: A New Way to Surf Internet?"
by PhysOrg.com
"Web browser pioneer Marc Andreessen is betting people are ready to try a different way of surfing the Internet. That's why he is backing a new browser call RockMelt, which will be available for the first time Monday after nearly two years in development. RockMelt is built on the premise that most online activity today revolves around socializing on Facebook, searching on Google, tweeting on Twitter and monitoring a handful of favorite websites.
Andreessen revolutionized Internet with the introduction of the Netscape browser in the mid-1990s. He is helping to fund and advise RockMelt as a member of the startup's board of directors. The new browser was created by Tim Howes and Eric Vishria, who used to work for Andreessen."
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"RockMelt is built first and foremost for sharing. You browse with your friends (the first thing you do is log into Facebook and your favorite friends and their latest status updates are always available along the left rail). And there is a big “Share” button up top, which lets you share any webpage, along with images and a preview, on Facebook. You could call it a Facebook browser, but it really is more than that. I’ll get into my full review shortly, but if you want to try out RockMelt for yourself, be one of the first 500 TechCrunch readers to click this link and you will get an invite before anyone else).
The three biggest changes to the browser that you notice with RockMelt is that it is built around friends, feeds, and search results. The left rail is for friend. The right rail is for sites. And the top rail is for search.
Your Facebook friends browse with you along the left-hand rail. You can select your most important or closest Facebook friends, and their faces are always there with you along with an indication whether they are online or not. If you hover over a face, their latest status update pops up. click on their face and you get a box showing their Facebook stream in the top half, and a chat box in the bottom. So it acts as an IM client using Facebook chat (see screenshot below). You even get inline images and video, which you don’t normally get in Facebook chat. If your friend is offline, you can send him or her a Facebook message.
Along the right rail is where you organize all your news feeds and streams from your favorite sites. This is kind of like a bookmark bar, but when you save a site here, it also includes notifications every time new content has been added. This is very convenient for news sites, blogs, Gmail, Twitter, and your own Facebook profile. (See screenshot below). Click on a site icon, and you up pops an overlay window with an RSS feed with all the articles, or Twitter stream, or your email headlines, depending the site. Click on a headline and it takes you to that page (or email or Tweet) in the main underlying browser window. There is also a share button for every feed item, which works just like the big share button up at the top of the browser.
When you do a search from the search box, instead of taking you to Google, you get a column with the first ten results. You can tab through each result, which is pre-loaded into the browser, so you can actually see the Web pages behind each result in the full browser. This is designed to speed up searching, although at least initially I find myself tabbing through each link, if only for a second or two.
Overall, RockMelt seems really fast. It is built on Chromium, the same open source browser that forms the foundation of Google’s Chrome browser. Given the fact that it is backed by Andreessen (and Ron Conway, Bill Campbell, Josh Kopelman, and Diane Green to the tune of $10 million) and its principle architect was also the principle architect of the Netscape browser, this is a pretty significant vote of confidence in Chromium as the future of browsing. “Chromium is a newer codebase,” explains Andreessen. “It is state of the art. The performance increase is unbelievable.” He’s not one for nostalgia."
•••The three biggest changes to the browser that you notice with RockMelt is that it is built around friends, feeds, and search results. The left rail is for friend. The right rail is for sites. And the top rail is for search.
Your Facebook friends browse with you along the left-hand rail. You can select your most important or closest Facebook friends, and their faces are always there with you along with an indication whether they are online or not. If you hover over a face, their latest status update pops up. click on their face and you get a box showing their Facebook stream in the top half, and a chat box in the bottom. So it acts as an IM client using Facebook chat (see screenshot below). You even get inline images and video, which you don’t normally get in Facebook chat. If your friend is offline, you can send him or her a Facebook message.
Along the right rail is where you organize all your news feeds and streams from your favorite sites. This is kind of like a bookmark bar, but when you save a site here, it also includes notifications every time new content has been added. This is very convenient for news sites, blogs, Gmail, Twitter, and your own Facebook profile. (See screenshot below). Click on a site icon, and you up pops an overlay window with an RSS feed with all the articles, or Twitter stream, or your email headlines, depending the site. Click on a headline and it takes you to that page (or email or Tweet) in the main underlying browser window. There is also a share button for every feed item, which works just like the big share button up at the top of the browser.
When you do a search from the search box, instead of taking you to Google, you get a column with the first ten results. You can tab through each result, which is pre-loaded into the browser, so you can actually see the Web pages behind each result in the full browser. This is designed to speed up searching, although at least initially I find myself tabbing through each link, if only for a second or two.
Overall, RockMelt seems really fast. It is built on Chromium, the same open source browser that forms the foundation of Google’s Chrome browser. Given the fact that it is backed by Andreessen (and Ron Conway, Bill Campbell, Josh Kopelman, and Diane Green to the tune of $10 million) and its principle architect was also the principle architect of the Netscape browser, this is a pretty significant vote of confidence in Chromium as the future of browsing. “Chromium is a newer codebase,” explains Andreessen. “It is state of the art. The performance increase is unbelievable.” He’s not one for nostalgia."
More information: http://www.rockmelt.com/
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