Mark's Blog

Well I had vaguely heard of RockMelt in the media over the last few weeks and wasn’t really sure what to make of it. The fact that it was backed by one of the founders of netscape a company with a product that defined the early internet; before the anti competitive behavior of a certain multinational company killed it added extra weight to the product.

A work colleague and friend (@ronbrett) was able to hook me up with an invite so I decided to take a look. What initially struck me was how much like Google Chrome(or the opensource chromium which chrome is based on) it looked which for was a plus as I have been using Google chrome for a couple of years now and its by far my browser of choice. I know some get very uptight about the live search bar as yes unless you turn off the functionality the address bar also functions as a Google search bar and every letter is searched upon to help you either search Google or to auto-complete the URL you are trying to access. Now this of course means that Google have a record of every URL you have visited which can be used by them to amongst other things better target and tailor adds that Google deliver, now basically you have to make a choice does this amount of information worry you or not? Whilst it might be able to enable Google to create a fairly accurate picture of who you are, I always tend to decide well I am one of millions its not like anyone at Google is tracking me and if they are so what? This is something you have to decide for yourself, for me I love the functionality of the search in the URL box and the auto-completing of URLs for me. However I digress as the point of this is that RockMelt is actually based on the open source chromium project. This for me is a very big plus point as I like chromium/Chrome. I’m not sure how close they are to latest Chromium code and if it supports HTML5 and other newer standards that Chromium now supports I hope they are quickly porting over the good updates to improve RockMelt.

I have to admit I actually quite like RockMelt and I think its definitely something worth keeping an eye on if you are a user of social media such as Facebook and twitter. It also handles RSS feeds really well. As the screen shot shows the interface is a tabbed browser very much like Chromium, there are a few interface tweaks like moving the menu button up to the top left, chromium users will again find this menu very familiar and I actually find it to be a very usable place for the menu. The usual options from chromium are available including incognito browsing which of course people only use to do such innocent activities as buying gifts for others who might also have access to the computer.

What really makes RockMelt stand out is the extra bars to the left and right of the window, the left bar is basically your Facebook friends list where you can then use Facebook chat to talk to friends, or even see there recent Facebook activity stream. To the right is your feeds bar this includes your Facebook and twitter streams but any other RSS feeds from your favorite sites. I have to admit I really like this layout and its the first time I have seen RSS feeds in a browser in a position which feels natural and not just tacked on somehow. There are a few changes to the address bar too, the bookmark button has been moved to the left hand side of the address bar, and like the more recent versions of Chromium the initial http:// has been removed from the address bar. I feel this is a minor but very nice tweak to remove superfluous information that people really have no need to see, as with chromium if the page you are visiting is SSL secured it shows the https:// and either red or green depending on the site as per chromium. The final changes on the browser interface from chrome are a status button so that you can update your twitter or Facebook status, disappointingly however there appears to be no option to update your status on both services at the same time, a functionality I like in tweetdeck and gwibber. To the right of the address bar there is a share button to quickly share your currently displayed page on twitter or Facebook, and again disappointingly no option to update both services. There is also a seperate search box which seems pointless given that it appears the main address box functions as a search box too, I guess this might be useful if you have disabled the live search in the URL bar. Lastly there is currently an invite button to invite new people to try RockMelt I guess this will be removed or replaced in the release version.

All in all I really think its a nice idea and worthy of a trial. At the moment I am not planning on replacing chrome but I am very interested and at some future date this may very well replace Chrome as my browser of choice, although the question is will Google add similar or even better functionality to Chrome in the future.

I just wanted to finish off with a list of the things that I really would like to see addressed before I am likely to make this my browser of choice.

• Its good that RockMelt currently supports Windows and Mac, but I do most of my browsing on my laptop which is 99% of the time running Linux(Ubuntu 10.10 to be exact). The lack of Linux support is probably the biggest show stopper for me.
• One of the things I really like about Chrome is the bookmark, extension and theme sync with my Google account. Because of this every time I open Chrome on any machine on any operating system it always looks the same. I have the same extensions installed, the same bookmarks and themes for me this is killer functionality and I wouldn’t consider switching to a browser that lacks this.
• Import of bookmarks from Chrome really isn’t handled very well at present, given that its basically the same browser I find it lazy that my bookmarks are just copied into a new folder called imported from chrome, and my previous favorites on the bookmark bar are not placed back onto the bar. It should really be a very simple job to copy my settings from chrome over directly including extensions and bookmarks.
• Given that this is supposed to be your social media hub its lacking email which whilst a bit of a dinosaur is still used by many and is still a very useful form of communication.
• There appears to be no support for other social media facilities such as four-square, blogger or WordPress. Infact there is no inbuilt support for blogging at all I find this to be a major omission. I hope they not only add more social media facilities including blogging but also put in a framework so that new social networks can add plugins and extensions that give parity with Facebook and twitter.
• My final bug bear in this first release is the lack of instant messaging with other protocols than Facebook chat, Facebook chat is based on jabber/xmpp but there is even no support for other services based on gabber/xmpp like google talk. Yahoo and MSN messenger are also not present and neither is the veteran irc which is still very much in use.
• As a suggestion I would also recommend that tools to browse and use forums based on software such as phpbb and vbulletin are added. Many people use forums but there seems to be a real lack of browser tools to warm people of new posts and replies.

I’m not sure if the product actually deserves all the hype that has so far been attached and writing this final section I realize it would be nice to be able to hide the side bars so I can properly concentrate on what I am doing.  The status changes of people in the friends bar is very distracting. This is certainly a very interesting project and I hope it gives others in the browser market some ideas so to what people want in the future.

Finally I now have four invites send me a message on Facebook if you want to try it out for yourself, as unfortunately this product is very tied to Facebook and the only way to give out invites is via Facebook.

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