Andreesen Offers New Browser 'Rockmelt'

DrHeasley writes "Rockmelt, available for the first time Monday, is built on the premise that most online activity today revolves around socializing on Facebook, searching on Google, tweeting on Twitter and monitoring a handful of favorite websites. It tries to minimize the need to roam from one website to the next by corralling all vital information and favorite services in panes and drop-down windows. 'This is a chance for us to build a browser all over again,' Andreessen said. 'These are all things we would have done (at Netscape) if we had known how people were going to use the Web.'"

Comments

$10 says this fails miserably

[Captain Splendid]

I mean, this Andreesen we're talking about. He's still looking to stay relevant when his best days are over 10 years behind him.

Re:$10 says this fails miserably

[Deep Esophagus]

I won't take that bet. He has a point that the Huddled Masses use their browsers -- nay, the entirety of teh intrawebz -- for those limited purposes, but the set of people who use their browsers in such a limited capacity intersected with the set of users who would have the motivation and technical awareness to seek out and install a new browser and start using that by default is small to nonexistent.

Re:$10 says this fails miserably

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that "creating a new browser" is, when the changes are basically UI layer, pretty damn simple and cheap(and this isn't really a new thing, any VB n00b has been able to drag and drop the IE's rendering engine into their application since forever, Firefox's UI is very nearly just a specially shaped web page wrapped around the web page(yo dog, I herd you like web pages...), and now webkit is the new hotness for basing browsers around).

I'd be very surprised if it does too much supplanting of the main players, or otherwise sets the world on fire(especially since he is basically just moving the classic 90's "portal" concept out of the webpage and into the browser, which means that any web player with a "portal" style site can offer 90% or so of what he does; but without the download/install) but assuming it has anything resembling a revenue model, either present or plausible future, he should be able to keep the venture going more or less indefinitely at very low cost.

When you have something that can survive essentially forever on very slim resources it is hard to "fail miserably". Even if you fold, the losses are reasonably constrained, and you don't have to make that much money, or create some plausible promise of future profits, in order to be self sustaining or better. I would be seriously shocked if this "Rockmelt" ends up contributing a single technological innovation to browsers; but having a few UI guys reinventing a combination of IFrames and RSS feeds on top of some FOSS browser base isn't hugely expensive or rocket-surgical.

Re:$10 says this fails miserably

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I agree that he has the Huddled Masses approximately accurately characterized; but I think that his major problem will be the fact that you can deliver the vast majority of what his browser promises in the form of a webpage that will work with pretty much any current browser(perhaps not quite as elegantly, since you won't be able to interface with the drop-down menus and things; but webmail isn't as elegant as client-based mail, and that is all the rage, on convenience lines...)

You've been able to embed multiple sites and information sources in a single page since IFrames, which I'm fairly sure were a feature of one of unfinished portions of Babbage's Difference Engine. Web-based RSS? Similarly old news. Google search boxes? I'm pretty sure that Google's site has one of those... With all the Web 2.0 stuff the kids are going on about these days, you could probably even make such a shambling composite of a site look and feel fairly elegant.

There is probably that last 10% or so which cannot be done as a simple web page; but the pace of development and the rate of "creative inspiration" in the browser market is huge. If they come up with anything genuinely cool, it'll be a Firefox plugin in two days, a Chrome plugin just after that, a native Opera feature in the next point release(available in the beta version in three weeks, for the Opera die-hards) and being hailed as Steve Jobs' latest brilliant breakthrough in UI perfection in the release of Safari accompanying OSX 10.N+1...

The problem is not so much that he is wrong; but that being right on that point is going to be a very hard distinction to sell...

Re:$10 says this fails miserably

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

How can this fail, when it is the equivalent of nailing a "Nielsen Box" to the user's forehead?

Hey! Why browse spy sites? You can deeply integrate surveillance and intrusive tracking experiences in your browser itself!

Never have that "I'm all alone" feeling, ever again.

Re:$10 says this fails miserably

[certain death]

It is just AOL for the 21st century...nothing to see here but what we want you to.

An internet portal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, where have I heard that idea before... and how did that work out for them?

Re:An internet portal?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

If you mean Yahoo, actually still pretty well. Yahoo search is basically dead; but they have a significant stable of non-search properties with huge pageview. Said stable seems increasingly likely to become a vassal of either Bing or Google, dependent on them for search and advertising monetization; but it will be a vassal who brings a large number of eyeballs to the table...

Re:An internet portal?

[DerekLyons]

Though you're right about Yahoo! branded properties with huge pageviews and a large installed userbase... But the elephant in the room is a property most people don't think of when they think Yahoo! - Flickr.

Google has tried to make a competitor, but like so many of their attempts outside of search they haven't really put much effort into it.

Flock? Chrome Extensions?

[Enderandrew]

There are nice Chrome extensions with Chromed Bird that allow you to easily pull down a menu of Tweets, and have new tweets pop-up. There are entire existing browser projects like Flock designed for this purpose.

Why do we need this?

We've seen this before

[Papeh]

He's got the same attitude as the Windows guys. He doesn't get that the browser / OS has a main goal of getting out of the way and letting you work.

Re:We've seen this before

[Abcd1234]

He's got the same attitude as the Windows guys. He doesn't get that the browser / OS has a main goal of getting out of the way and letting you work.

And thus you demonstrate that you have no clue how most people spend their time on the internet, and that you are clearly not the target market for this software.

That's fine. But, as is so common with Slashdotters, you presume that the tiny minority you are a part of somehow represents the majority of humanity. It's cute, but fantastically naive.

Huh

[Anrego]

This seems like the classic programmer issue of not googling before you code.

This exists! Not only are there plugins to chrome and firefox for this very purpose, but I believe there are at least 2 actual browsers (which no one uses) built around this idea.

This does not appear to do anything revolutionary, and certainly does not justify a completely new browser. This could easily have been implemented as an extension to existing browsers.

Re:Huh

[icebraining]

How do you know this wasn't started 3 years ago

Because this is built over Chromium, which only exists for two years. And Flock was already 3 years old and perfectly usable by that time.

so, basically...

[Dzimas]

This is a browser for people like my mom. Perhaps that'll work, although most people fight back hard when they perceive they're using a dumbed-down tool. We want all the bells and whistles, whether or not we actually need them or know how to use them. Microsoft's latest iterations of Word and Excel demonstrate this admirably.

Re:Flock

[somersault]

There were already many MP3 players, touch phones, tablets etc out there before Apple released their iDevices. Just because things have failed in the past doesn't mean they can't take off if you design and market them well.

Re:Flock

[NotQuiteReal]

Q: Why create another browser for no one to use?
A: $10 million in funding

Re:Flock

[ThePhilips]

Flock was my first though too.

And why the Flock hasn't cannibalized the FireFox might to be the response to the question why this are not so big news. Power of the web is the power of change: yesterday it was Altavista and news groups and Yahoo boards, today it is Facebook and Twitter and Google, but tomorrow it might be all gone replaced by some new trend in how we share and search for the information.

And the power of change is what would keep the specialized browsers in a niche for quite some time.

Re:Flock

[characterZer0]

Maybe someday it will be replaced by a large number of "pages" with useful content grouped into "sites" than can reference other useful content with "links".

Re:Flock

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you suggesting that the site necessarily needs a gigantic plain-text bulleted list of things that it can do right in the middle of the page? The vast majority of people browsing the web nowadays (hint, it's the Facebook/MySpace/Twitter/Whatever crowd) have browsers that already have Flash installed, so watching an introductory video is not out of the question for them. This is a browser pointed at the people using those networks, who are generally not that computer savvy, who would (much rather, I'd say) watch a video to figure out if it was something they'd want to mess with rather than reading a list of points they may or may not understand.

Beyond that, if you're even remotely curious about what something can do, since when did the User Guide become an invalid source for information?

Re:Flock

[Doomdark]

If and when their business idea is to get people interested, yes, they might want to focus bit more on making it blatanly obvious what they offer. I am sure there are many whose attention span is long enough to spend a minute digging for information; but there are many who do not, and after rather short amount of time give it up with "screw that, whatever" attitude. So unless they intentionally want to reduce audience it would seem like a good idea to, yes, make it ridiculously obvious instead of just possible to find out.