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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
which is totally what she said
Q: Why create another browser for no one to use?
A: $10 million in funding
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
Well, maybe it's because Flock doesn't actually say what it fucking well does on its damn website. People, when making software, try to say what it does on the front page, or with a prominent link. Screenshots are a must. It flabbergasts me that the people at Flock could get this so colossally wrong.
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..."