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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.'"
Isn't there already a browser that does this that no one uses? Why create another browser for no one to use?
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Now, where have I heard that idea before... and how did that work out for them?
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?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Welp, count me out.
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.
Except Andreesen didn't write it, his VC firm funded it. Considering Andreesen has also invested heavily in Digg and Twitter, I'd say he has a decent track record there.
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.
corralling all vital information and favorite services in panes and drop-down windows.
You mean like tabs and bookmarks?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
How did they pick that for a name? It's like they had two dart boards, one with nouns, the other with verb. At least some of the other web browsers' names made sense, (Navigator, Explorer or Safari). Firefox, Chrome & Opera don't really make much sense either, but at least they don't sound ridiculous.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
RockMelt only works if you have a Facebook account.
Ouch. With facebooks abysmal privacy record I am not going to use this browser.
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
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.
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.
Me too.
Yet somehow i'm not that disappointed. It's sort of like not being eligible for a free drool-tray because I haven't had a lobotomy.
Oh well.
Nice money if you can get it.
It seems Mr Andreesen has $10 million burning a hole in his pocket. That must have been some sales pitch.
Not bad though, mention "Social Web" with your product and it equates to funding.
I'm going to create my new product - The "Social Toilet" - it's a cubicle that everyone can share and allows you to twitter, facebook, search and share your poop.
I'm going to need about $10 million to get me started.
He characterizes his browser as a step up from NETSCAPE...I guess no one told him...
I watched the video and it almost makes me want to have friends!
English is not this
I love how it makes a big thing about being all 'on the cloud' - access your settings anywhere! Would be impresive if Mozilla hadn't just pushed out Firefox Sync across the board. This whole idea seems like something that would have been impressive 4 years ago.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
This blog post is the source of the story. Some quotes:
"Share or tweet links often? Yeah, us too. No more wading through each site’s goofy share widget or copy-pasting URLs. We built sharing directly into the browser, right next to the URL bar. Like a site or story? Click “Share” and BAM – link shared."
"Behind the scenes, RockMelt is always working on your behalf. Do you visit the same site 10 times a day, checking for new posts or updates? Well, RockMelt keeps track of all your favorite sites for you, alerting you when a new story comes out, a friend posts new pictures, or a new video is available. And when you open a RockMelt feed, the content is already waiting for you."
None of this sounds world shattering.
"Your friends are important to you, so we built them in. Now you’re able to chat, share that piano-playing-cat video everyone’s going to love, or just see what your friends are up to, regardless of what site you’re on."
Browsing together with friends and commenting is promising. Others have tried and failed, but maybe they can get it right. Some more analysis at the reg.
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.
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...
I won't bet on it failing until Gartner predicts that it'll be making $2 billion in revenue by 2014.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Mr. Andreesen,
Let me get this straight.
To get access to your browser beta, I need to let you:
Includes name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information I've shared with everyone.
email me directly at xxx@xxx
post status messages, notes, photos, and videos to my Wall
This is what you've learned in 15 years? What happened to just a "Netscape Now!" button?
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
It's not the first browser you log into. MSN Explorer was a piece of crap that required a log in too!
invested heavily in Digg and Twitter
he has a decent track record there.
So which is it?
It is just AOL for the 21st century...nothing to see here but what we want you to.
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus