Netscape Founder Backs New Browser

wirelessjb writes to share that after a resounding defeat at the hands of Microsoft in the first major browser war of the mid 1990s, Marc Andreessen is looking to have another go at the market by backing a new startup called "RockMelt." "Mr. Andreessen suggested the new browser would be different, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the Web, which had grown from an array of static Web pages into a network of complex Web sites and applications. 'There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch,' Mr. Andreessen said. RockMelt was co-founded by Eric Vishria and Tim Howes, both former executives at Opsware, a company that Mr. Andreessen co-founded and then sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for about $1.6 billion. Mr. Howes also worked at Netscape with Mr. Andreessen."

Comments

Tim Howes

[GPLDAN]

Tim Howes is also the inventor of the LDAP Protocol, when he was a grad student at UMich studying DAP and DIT under X.500 of OSI fame.

Re:Chrome 2

[Enderandrew]

Flock already integrates with social networking sites. IE8 does this as well.

I think you're correct that the point of RockMelt is to monetize this.

Re:Chrome 0

[Enderandrew]

I also just pulled up Safari on Windows, and it uses the same number of elements as Firefox, and almost an identical UI.

You have the menu-bar.

Below that you have navigation links next to the address bar, and then the search bar. Below that is the bookmark menu (which I almost always turn off).

Safari uses smaller icons than Firefox by default, but Firefox makes it easier to install a theme with smaller icons.

Re:Chrome 0

[Darkness404]

I think you might want the high contrast inverse theme on GNOME. Not sure if the colors are right (not being color-blind myself) but it has good contrast.

YOU'VE GOT TO BE FUCKING SHITTING ME!!!

[sootman]

Sorry for the shouting and swearing, but I am just BLOWN AWAY by this. Does anyone else remember the comic that Google released last year to introduce Chrome?

PAGE FUCKING ONE:

Today, most of what we use the web for on a day-to-day basis aren't just web pages, they're applications. Wouldn't it be great, then, to start from scratch, and design something based on the needs of today's web applications and today's users?
--Google, 9/2/2008

And from today's FA:

But Mr. Andreessen suggested the new browser would be different, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the Web, which had grown from an array of static Web pages into a network of complex Web sites and applications. "There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch," Mr. Andreessen said.
--Marc Andreessen, 8/13/2009

It's as if he fell asleep reading the comic, dreamt about it, and woke up thinking he had an original idea. Then again, TFA says he said "most other browsers", so maybe he's specifically excluding Chrome? :-)