Slashdot Mirror
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."
Netscape's interface was the best
Long live Seamonkey
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
'There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch,' Mr. Andreessen said.
Yeah, I'd build a browser more like... Chrome. Which addressed this issue less than two years ago. Has the web changed a lot in two years?
What's the profit model for this startup? That's the most interesting question, to me.
Terrorist, bomb, al Qaeda, nuclear, yellowcake, kill, assassinate. Carnivore is dead... long live Echelon.
... That is the sound of inevitability... It is the sound of your death... Goodbye, Mr. Andreessen...
Marc: My name... is RockMelt!
The Rockmelt website isn't too interesting. It's a bit presumptuous to assume it will get a /.ing. Perhaps it is suffering from the Marketing Dept assuming people will come back later in the hope of revelation, rather than them saying "ooh nice logo" and then instantly forgetting about them and moving along.
I'd build a browser more like... Chrome.
I wouldn't. I'd dump most of the custom GUI features in Chrome and Firefox, and quit screwing around with the stuff around the browser window. It's the stuff inside the browser window that you actually care about, not whether the icons are grey metal or jello blue.
You have a problem with authority, Mr. Andreessen. You believe that you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously you are mistaken. The intrawebz is one of the most totally awesome things in the world because every single browser understands that they are part of a whole. Thus if a blag has a problem, the tubes have a problem. The time has come to make a choice, Mr. Andreessen. Either you choose to respect the tubes from this day forth or you choose to find yourself another industry. Do I make myself clear?
AccountKiller
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.
That article was so light on on content all that we can summarize is that RockMelt is another browser. A browser with a creative name, that has a "browser rock star" who is backing it, and one that has some new "plug-in" features with Facebook. So why am I lacking any excitement by this? Correct me if I'm wrong but it's not like Andreessen is a Steve Job's visionary or anything.
It'll have built in twitter and facebook access. Totally social networkitized
What does he mean that most browsers aren't keeping pace with the web? By definition, browsers define the pace of the web. If your browser can't see it then it doesn't exist yet.
There's no one out there making a good living by creating webpages that browsers can't display.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Tell me Mr. Andreessen, what good is a new browser, if you are unable to . . . ?
You know it makes sense, a little reminder from jointm1k.
or I am going to kick your ass!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I'm pretty sure someone already made Flock. :)
"Little else is known about RockMelt, and Mr. Vishria was unwilling to discuss it. "We are at very early stages of development," Mr. Vishria said. "Talking about it at this stage is not useful."
Good thing it was on Slashdot where nothing is useful.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
This "article" is just another marketing ploy for some vapourware. Can't you see that? By gum, /. isn't the same these days 8) There are a couple of good jokes in this topic but in the end this is all just an exercise in promotion and we are it's semi willing participants, breathing life into the marketing machine.
IT'S ALL JUST BOLLOCKS - I WANT NEWS ON MY /. NOT THIS SHIT.
I just checked the date, I thought for sure it must be April 1st.
Marc Andreessen is jumping into the browser wars again? What's next, Ford announces a "re-imagined" Edsel?
I did some digging around and found an e-mail to a google group from a guy settings up RockMelts site:
http://www.mail-archive.com/scalr-discuss@googlegroups.com/msg02866.html
The same guy asked questions on the Chromium mailing list, "helping a co-worker get the chromium src".
http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/105e19e8d4f6c650?pli=1
Probably nothing, but could be something...
Judging from what little was revealed in TFA, I guess RockMelt more or less requires you to have a Facebook account, and to use a Facebook login to access RockMelt's features. Talk about bundling! So rather than be an agnostic client agent to surf the web, RockMelt is going to serve as a portal to funnel you, the user, through a specific service before you get anywhere else. I'm sure Andreesen is also betting that this will funnel more dollars into his pockets, since he will create a more captive audience for his service.
No thanks, not a fan of lock-in of any kind. Also not a fan of most social networking services, which is why I have avoided Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et. al.
Someone has forgotten the first rule of Loudcloud.
Breakfast served all day!
The big story here is Mr. Andreessen is backing a browser product, a market thought to be dead and buried in terms of profit. He was profiled in Forbes a while back and his name resonates with the financial types. He has credibility with investors because he called Facebook and Twitter (among others) as a buy pretty early in their lifecycles. Corollary, the Forbes article mentions that he has a crap-ton of OPM to invest now, so he can afford to take some long-shots. -ellie
Once on a flight, I was reading a book about web standards, and the guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation. He said that he knew a lot about the web, joining Netscape in 1995 and staying near the end, being one of the last two or three employees. He said that Netscape was undone because upper management got extremely arrogant over their initial dominance in the browser market. They thought nobody, not even Microsoft could take them down.
He said they would laugh at feature requests by users, play foosball and drink beer all day...basically one big party while IE slowly and surely crushed them.
Based on this, I would be very wary that anyone associated with the original Netscape has the management skills to make a new browser a success.
:q!
RockMelt is going to be born dead. There is nothing it can do in terms of Facebook integration that Firefox + Facebook-related theme + Facebook plugin. And RockMelt has no viable business model - there is no place anymore for mainstream browsers.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
we all know how popular flock turned out to be.
..we were doing all that "flying through strange landscapes of flying numbers and other weird futuristic landscapes" stuff in the 60s, and didn't even need the goggles!
Each process is placed in a sandbox to protect your security and privacy.
Jails/partitions, or just chroot? What, on Windows?
Or do you mean the javascript engine is a separate instance (because it's a separate process) so they're sandboxed from each other because they're in different processes. Which is a good thing, but describing it as putting each PROCESS in a sandbox is misleading as hell.
Remove ALL GUIs that use traditional windows/dialogs/menus and make them all like PVR OSD menus that
are easy to use, look pretty and most of call can be accessed by a remote control or touch screen easily.
Use overlays with transparency for status bars/widgets/addons.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
This is a little off-topic, but here is another example. There is a litany of evidence that Intel used illegal, anti-competitive practices against AMD. Every major vendor lined up to testify against Intel because of this. Several countries have already found Intel guilty. But those illegal business tactics were effective to the point that it kept AMD from developing market share, even when they had superior products. Intel cheated, ran AMD into the ground, and even when all the anti-trust trials are over, AMD might not even exist anymore, let alone come out a victor in any way shape or form.
The lesson seems to be that cheaters do prosper. What you might pay in a fine later is a drop in the bucket to winning market share and becoming a monopoly.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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? :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
"If there are a hundred password remember-ers, maybe the built in one sucks?"
No, it doesn't. I don't need a new password remebering system, and I DON'T more bloat to include stuff "other people" find useful. If you want that, I heard Opera is nice. But let me keep my Firefox feature less, thank you.
Dilbert RSS feed