

RockMelt - atularora
http://blog.rockmelt.com/post/1509448074/world-meet-rockmelt

======
seldo
I'm a little disappointed. A truly social browser should introduce something
social that is intrinsic to the browser itself, not just integrate with
existing social sites.

A browser should be a basic tool that works equally well for everyone. This
browser has Facebook and Twitter built in -- fine for the US/UK market, but
what about Europe, South America, and all over Asia, where different networks
hold sway? Even if you did try to build integration for all these networks,
you would forever be playing catch-up, trying to write a single application
with all the features provided by 50 other application development teams. I
don't think it makes sense.

What if your browser became the new unit of social networking -- like a
diaspora node? That would be truly new, and truly universal, at least in
potential.

All that said, this still looks interesting to me -- I'm definitely part of
the target demographic. I might even end up using it regularly. I was just
hoping for something a little more fundamental.

~~~
seldo
Replying to myself (I know, it sends you blind) now that I have my hands on
the beta:

This is Chrome. It looks almost identical apart from a VERY distracting list
of of your friends' Facebook profile pics down the left hand side, and equally
distracting "unread" counts from your Facebook and Twitter feeds on the right.

The oddest thing is that this browser seems to _require_ that you log in to
Facebook to start it -- at least, I didn't see a cancel button. The next time
Facebook has an outage that's going to be really interesting (also, I can
imagine people who work at Facebook QA will confuse the hell out of it).

The bookmarks bar is disabled by default. Instead, your bookmarks are
integrated into the "about:blank" page, which is an interesting idea. However,
I am a heavy user of bookmarklets (delicious/tumblr/awe.sm), which need to be
in a real bookmark bar to be able to work, so I needed to enable the bookmarks
bar, a setting which is a little buried.

The Twitter client is activated by hitting the "unread tweets" button on the
right hand side. The client is full-featured if a little rough-edged right now
-- but if I'm in a browser already, why wouldn't I just have a tab with
Twitter's excellent web client open? Likewise the Facebook client. It's maybe
saving me one click, but if I have my Facebook/Twitter tabs closed it's
because I'm trying to get some work done, so the unread counts don't help.

There are some interesting potential features in here, though. The right-hand
side allows you to add feeds for other websites, which is a potentially
powerful idea. The integrated sharing tools are extremely slick -- maybe if
they provided a way for websites to automatically integrate their own sharing
tools I wouldn't miss the bookmarks bar so much.

I'll give it a few more hours, but my initial impressions are mixed at best.

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
Sounds similar to the way that Google Chrome OS makes you log into Google to
begin. I really hope that mandatory federated authentication doesn't become
the norm for everything.

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uptown
So in exchange for what they say is making my life easier, faster and more
social ... they get to log everything I search for, index everything I share,
watch everywhere I browse, earn revenue off of my searches, and store it all
in their cloud?

Yeah ... I'll pass.

~~~
mark_h
My thoughts too, although they address this (and claim they never will) in the
techcrunch coverage: [http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/07/rockmelt-browser-
sharing-re...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/07/rockmelt-browser-sharing-
review/)

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leif
Tired of this concept. I already use my browser to use twitter, facebook, etc.
Why does it need to natively support twitter, facebook, etc? I thought the
purpose of a browser was to execute web apps, and third-party app-specific
clients were supposed to execute a single webapp. The crossover seems
unnecessary, and hopelessly proprietary. If at some point, facebook dies and
(maybe) something else takes it place, where does that leave rockmelt?

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riffraff
isn't the "let's put the web inside the browser chrome instead of the main
window" quite similar to what flock[1] was already trying?

The world is probably different from a few years ago, so there is probably a
higher chance that this might succeed.

[1]<http://flock.com/>

~~~
barkmadley
Don't specialised browsers like Flock and now Rockmelt get superseded by
browser extensions that provide 99% of the functionality?

You may not be able to put make a tweet this link button right where you want
it but you can get pretty darn close.

~~~
greenlblue
Indeed and with a little programming knowledge you could even make your own
plugins.

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mst
What is it at the moment with people posting websites with silly names with
just the name as the title?

Hey people, HN already displays the domain name - put something useful in
there please!

~~~
Zecc
My thoughts exactly. It feels like they're trying to convey as little
information as possible, so that people have to follow the link if they want
to know what it's about.

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ethank
We don't need more chrome, more social in the browser. If anything we need
less chrome, and more of a sense of workplace management around the types of
sites we visit. I'd rather the site dictate my social experience, and let the
browser help me work, organize information, and experience my online social
ontology without encumbrance.

~~~
ethank
Here's the biggest problem with Rockmelt:

<http://plixi.com/p/55680955>

It assumes I have a singular window to the virtual world, and yet its social
experience model of sidebars does not scale well when applied linearly to the
way I consume information using browsers.

It's an immediate fail. I usually run maybe two dozen browser windows, each
with tabs. The modality of that experience will not map on to how I should
consume the social aspects of my online life.

~~~
PStamatiou
Well said Ethan. My browsing habits are very much the same. Several windows,
each with related tabs. IE, one for "productivity" with gmail and work-related
sites, another window for code-related stuff - usually some stackoverflow
searches, et cetera. Don't want each to be cluttered by those two mini-
sidebars. Perhaps replace the "blank new tab" page with some of that social
stuff as an option.

------
mattmaroon
I can see the usage case for this. Right now my browsing experience contains
the following:

Roboform for password creation, filling, sync., etc. I find it indispensable
and it's one of the few softwares I paid for.

Roboform passcards saved in Dropbox, so my Roboforms on all my machines will
sync. There is now a Roboform Online, which I also use, which totally obviates
this, and if I'm ever feeling motivated I'll simply move them out of Dropbox.
That probably won't happen soon since there's no perceivable benefit.

Xmarks to keep bookmarks synced across different browsers on different
machines. I typically use Firefox, though often Chrome, and at work IE for
testing stuff.

Some annoying service to sync bookmarks to my Android browser. I tried Firefox
beta but it's just not ready, so the stock browser has to do. I still have to
manually export these though, yuck.

This giant hodgepodge of services keeps my browser sorta could-based, but it's
still far from perfect. I still have to install all this on every machine and
set it up. It's annoying to deal with, but it runs smoothly and it works.

Rockmelt could easily replace all of this if they just had an Android browser.
Without that I'm still stuck with all of it even if I want to use Rockmelt,
which I might if Roboform works. (Roboform online for Android is indispensable
too.)

------
bretthellman
What is it that RockMelt does extremely well? I'm using the beta and I don't
see anything. It requires me to change my behavior in terms of searching etc,
which I hate. Lastly, Rockmelt is distracting. There is way to much 'stuff'
going on. It looks like a nasa dashboard with the Facebook profile photos
flashing and icons updating.

------
aberkowitz
Whatever social web browsers were supposed to be has been superceded by the
next generation of smartphones.

With Android, IOS, WebOS, Symbian, et al. anybody can get up to date
notifications about anyone's location, feelings, and opinions aggregated from
their favorite sources - no "computer" required.

------
greenlblue
Saw the video. Not impressed. All my browser plugins already do that and then
some.

------
robryan
I think the only thing that is really missing which hampers social in the
current browser is lack of push notifications. What would be ideal is if I
could close Facebook but still authorize push notifications when something
happens, this can be done in something like Growl but it doesn't seem like a
major use case, remote push notifications.

I recently saw that push notifications had been proposed in the HTML5 spec
then later removed, not sure why. Although I still think that you have to have
a tab open on the site to receive them.

------
sahillavingia
I see "Rock Me It" whenever I look at the name.

------
mpiccino
So... the plain browser experience is okay, but nothing out of the ordinary...
I'm not feeling the "social" aspect of it all yet, except for highly sub-par
Facebook & Twitter feeds on that right sidebar. And those are too crammed and
cluttered to provide a good experience.

I don't want to just use this as a Chrome substitute simple because if I
ignore the extra features, it feels essentially the same... I'm not going to
give a company so much in terms of data on my activities & potential revenue
for so little added value in exchange.

I want to "get" this. But I haven't had my ah-ha moment yet. Will keep trying
a bit longer though...

------
pclark
my two cents on RockMelt: why would I change browser (lots of work) for an
experience. Is it 10x better at sharing or keeping me informed than my
previous tools? I doubt it. (eg: j.mp bookmarklet is awesome, everyone uses
tweetdeck, etc)

(I am somewhat biased because I run a vaguely similar (but very different
implementation) service: <http://readness.com>)

------
dotBen
For a team of 28 people (see team photo on
<http://www.rockmelt.com/thanks.html>) I was kinda expecting more than what I
downloaded, especially as this is just a skin on top of Chromium.

All of the heavy lifting in terms of the browser itself has been done for them
by Google.

~~~
whopa
From a cursory look, it appears they wrote all the new functionality in C++
(and ObjC for UI on the Mac). That's a lot of work. Why they didn't do the
bulk of it in JS/HTML/CSS is anybody's guess.

------
JarekS2
I think that this may be a good idea but should be implemented as a browser
plugin. I don't want to switch from Chrome to something based on Chrome that
will not be updated as fast and often as the original.

------
icco
Anyone else peeved that they said WebKit was by Apple?

~~~
kleiba
Was it not? Or do you allude to its Konqueror/KHTML roots?

~~~
icco
The fact that it is just a fork of KHTML. Also the fact that Apple hasn't been
the main contributor to it for over two years.

------
othermaciej
Seems underwhelming for 2 people and 28 years. I am curious what heavy social
media users think, though.

------
fara
I'm begining to hate those background Apple-ish guitar songs.

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drivebyacct2
Are there really 25 people working on this?

How? It's social plugins with easy APIs on top of a well written WebKit
browser.

At least, I assume that's what the footer there is for:
<http://www.rockmelt.com/>

~~~
ghshephard
Here's a much better picture of the team:
[http://www.rockmelt.com/thanks.html?dl=b9068e9a4c500efc8de47...](http://www.rockmelt.com/thanks.html?dl=b9068e9a4c500efc8de47aa3663968cacd3020b1)

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bhiggins
maybe they can get together with kiha and combine their pointless efforts.

