Does the world need yet another browser ??

Meet RockMelt, the Social Savvy Browser !

         A new "social" browser: RockMelt

RockMelt, a new browser that lives in the cloud and uses Facebook authentication to synchronize a user’s browsing experience across machines, went into limited public beta today.

It was built around the premise that the browser is busted. The thought is that older browsers aren’t made for the way we now use the web, and maybe it’s a solid way of thinking. After all, browsing is a passive activity, and the Internet is increasingly about interaction.

There are some unique concepts here, namely the fact that RockMelt lives in the cloud. This allows your “browser experience” to be, in a way, profiled. Your settings, bookmarks, etc., are all backed up online.

Using Facebook for authentication, your user environment can be replicated anywhere RockMelt is installed. And really, that’s what RockMelt is all about: The user environment.

Users of Google Chrome will feel at home, because RockMelt is built on Chromium, the open source project behind Google’s browser. The major differences are columns running down each side of the browser.

The left side depicts your favorite Facebook contacts. When a contact is listed on the left bar, you’ll be able to quickly initiate Facebook chats with them or post content to their Facebook walls. You can also easily send them e-mails through the seamless contact popout.

Straddling the right side is your bookmarks — and here’s another area where RockMelt’s cloud is put to clever use. Bookmarks are updated from the cloud, so content is cached and waiting for you when you log on.

All in all, RockMelt is an interesting twist on the browsing experience. The social elements of the browser make for a compelling and streamlined online interaction process. And because it’s powered by Chromium, it not only supports Chrome extensions, it’s guaranteed to support the latest and greatest aspects of the web, like HTML5 and CSS3.

RockMelt is now in limited beta and you can apply for an invitation. The company has released this video demonstration of its new browser:

RockMelt - Your Browser. Re-Imagined !!


                                 Tim Howes and Eric Vishria 

                                                           
                                 Co-founders of RockMelt 



Does the world need yet another browser? Tim Howes and Eric Vishria think that it does, and that is one of the reasons why two years ago they started Mountain View, Calif.-basedRockMelt, raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz (and scores of technology luminaries such VMWare co-founder Dianne Greene, Intuit’s Bill Campbell and Josh Kopelman) and hired away some of the best design and browser talent. Their socially aware browser will finally see the light of day today and will be made available as a beta version.

It is a bold move by the two co-founders. They are entering a hotly contested market that is dominated by Microsoft (Internet Explorer), Google (Chrome), Mozilla (Firefox) and Apple (Safari.) In addition, they are launching a desktop browser – it works on Windows and Mac OS – at a time when the axis of computing is shifting to touch-driven mobile devices.

Vishria and Howes say the reason they started the company was that, while people’s usage of web and the services they use have changed, the browser itself hasn’t changed very much. “The modern web has evolved to a point where it needs a new kind of browsing experience,” said Vishria, CEO of RockMelt. “I can’t understand why the web browsing experience is so serial, especially when we have so much available processing speeds, memory and available bandwidth.”

He argues that today, everyone in the browser market is about minimal user experience, ease of navigation and speed. What they are focused on is around people’s web usage – which centers on consuming content, social sharing and social networking.

RockMelt’s quest reminds me of another grand attempt to take on the browser establishment called Flock, which despite great social aspirations has had a tough go of it thus far. Vishria and Howes say that it is all about timing. Thanks to increased broadband penetration, the rise of cloud-based services and mainstream adoption of social services such as Facebook and Twitter, the browser itself needs to be social, said Howes, who worked at LoudCloud/Opsware along with Vishria.

“Most people communicate with a few friends and check only a few sites and we have made it easy for them to stay connected and get their information,” said Vishria. The browser integrates Facebook, Twitter and other social services right into the browser itself. At the same time, it makes it easy to add news feeds and other information sources. The browser, which is based on Chromium (the open source project behind Google’s Chrome browser), requires you to sign-in with your Facebook credentials. Once logged in, you can add your favorite friends and favorite news feeds on the left and right side of the browser. The browser makes it easy to update, tweet and share content via Facebook and Twitter. (See screenshots to get more details on the browser and its features.)

From the demos I saw, the 30-person company has done a fantastic job of integrating social features into the browsing experience. They have developed proprietary technologies (mostly HTML5-based) that make search a massively fast and more meaningful experience. The browser uses its built-in cache to pre-fetch and then pre-render a lot of content and make it available instantaneously.

However, they still have their work cut out for them — they are entering a saturated market and will need to fight for attention. They want to focus on mainstream consumers, but they have to contend with the harsh reality that people are slow to change and switch. Look at how long it took for Internet Explorer numbers to start sinking. And perhaps that is why they are focusing on getting the browser in the hands of many users before trying to build a business model. “Search is a good way for browsers to get paid and we are thinking about other services beyond search, but that comes later,” said Howes. For now, they will be happy if a million people are using their browser in six months.

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