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RockMelt: Google Chrome, Only Better

Posted by timothy on from the red-hot-magma dept.

Barence writes "PC Pro has an in-depth review of RockMelt, a new browser which it claims is better than Google Chrome. RockMelt is built on the same Chromium core as Google's browser, but adds a host of social networking, news feed and search features that elevate it above Chrome. The App Edge, for example, 'allows you to set up feeds for anything from your Twitter or Gmail accounts to your favourite news sites, and get a little iPhone-style numeric reminder of the number of items awaiting your attention.' It does, however, lack Chrome's built-in Flash, PDF and audio players."

14 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. So... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It lacks features that would make it a better browser (like the awesome PDF reader), and adds social networking an an RSS reader, which I can just get by going to the appropriate websites on any browser. Great.

    1. Re:So... by man_of_mr_e · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sounds more like "Google Chrome, only Worse, much worse" to me.

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    2. Re:So... by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 3, Funny

      Does any body here remember when the Internet didn't suck the life out of you, and exhaust your will to see tomorrow?

      Thanks!

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    3. Re:So... by Bacon+Bits · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Does any body here remember when the Internet didn't suck the life out of you, and exhaust your will to see tomorrow?

      Well, SlashDot was founded in 1997 and Fark in 1999, so... no.

      --
      The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
    4. Re:So... by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Informative

      Oh Lord yes, sadly the little childrens here now probably don't remember those days...sigh. Remember when most webpages were just text, with maybe a JPG or GIF?

      Before the days of Geocities with purple pages with snot green text, or the wonderful dose of the clap that was Comet Cursors, which would make a Bart Simpson start jabbering where your mouse was or the REALLY evil fucker, the dreaded "Pocketwatch from hell" that would slam the living shit out of your nice OC'd Celeron 300A and make the entire machine drag like a 386 running Win95, thanks to its wonderful "snotball physics" that would cause the damned thing to swing and sway like a damned ball and cup game when you tried to move?

      Ah those were the days, no tweeting twating facebook farting narcissistic bullshit, just text and email, and that was it. No 24/7/365 mobile twiddle twaddle, no smart this or pad that, you just walked away from your desktop and you were actually away from everything!

      Life was so simple back then, no fb updating, no MMOs, no craziness like paying real money for virtual crap, just simple and easy. Sure we would have killed for something better than out shotgunned modems, and you sure as hell didn't download anything better than a 64k MP3, hell you didn't even have space for it if you did! But life was simpler then, just text and BBS, your handy notebook with IP addresses, and no endless piles of noobs running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Now get off my lawn!

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    5. Re:So... by Count+Fenring · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Flock is (was, at this point) built on Firefox, but it's the same principle. And no, no-one needs this crap. Anyone who wants social stuff built into their browser can and will do it with an add-on. Anyone who doesn't will ditch a browser for having it.

    6. Re:So... by Bacon+Bits · · Score: 3, Funny

      Of course I was online before 1997. I just try not to remember it!

      --
      The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
  2. Flock by MrEricSir · · Score: 5, Funny

    Social media integration was such a great idea, and worked so well for Flock, I don't see why these guys could possibly fail.

    --
    There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
  3. Flock? by wasabioss · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They haven't learned the lesson from Flock, have they?

    I just want a goddamn browser, without any of the facebook twitter buttons and toolbars and shit. When I want to update my facebook status, I will get there.

  4. ...the social browser? by Papeh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm legitimately curious, are there people out there that are so awfully busy that they need a browser to check the news and Facebook for them? Did it suddenly become old-fashioned to actually type "cnn.com" in the address bar? I'm all for social networking and most everything that's happened in this field for the past few years. But at what point is it taken too far?

  5. This is how marketing works by synthesizerpatel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A company will send out press releases to media outlets (magazines, newspapers, tv shows / stations, bloggers) to inform them of new products or offerings.

    In some cases, marketing people will directly contact the magazine or newspaper by calling up and pitching a story based on their product or offering.

    Depending on the media outlet, thinly veiled advertising is achieved by the marketing person making a good impression on the media outlet, or by offering a free unit, and in some cases gifts. In some seedier situations money is exchanged so that the media outlet will portray the product in a favorable light, so that the reader's distrust of direct advertising can be circumvented through the illusion of new or useful information.

    And while I certainly don't mean to suggest that RockMelt paid off PC Pro for this story, more-so, I'd posit that PC Pro is just happy to get the hits.

    1. Re:This is how marketing works by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sadly enough, the payoff doesn't even have to be as exciting as that. Journalism, especially for second-string rags or random stuff blogs and special interest publications, suffers from a more or less continual deadline crunch. In addition to the usual pressure of getting the thing together in time for the next print run, you have the fact that they are trying to make up for their shrinking margins by extracting more words words fewer people.

      Under those circumstances, a vaguely neutral sounding press release(already conveniently typed up and more or less grammatically accurate!), that can just be massaged a touch and turned in is a blessing. Gotta churn out that content, make the deadline, look productive. Since the number of journalists has been slowly ebbing over time, and the number of PR flacks increasing, it only stands to reason that a greater percentage of "news" copy will be written by the latter.

      Of course, for stuff that actually matters, or has a big money ad campaign behind it, or someone who controls the precious "access", you can see more overt corruption; but for petty shit deadline pressure is actually a depressingly large part of it.

  6. Too many browsers. by Seor+Jojoba · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I would be happier to learn that I had less choices in browsers. But that is the developer bias. Still, it seems to me that you really have to raise the bar if you want to be taken seriously, not just be Chrome+1. And I'm resistant to features which are tied in to services offered by certain companies (Facebook, Twitter) instead of just standardized services (RSS, FTP).

    Larger question... would we not be better served if we started treating the browser more like a commodity item? Basic, standard features in an unglamorous browser, and... that's it. And then with a nice stable development platform that doesn't change around every 2 weeks, the real interesting features can start arriving at the web application layer. Standardize the browsers so we can forget about their individual features.

  7. Plugin by Maxx169 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wouldn't the features described be more suited to a Chrome plugin (would that be feasible?) rather than a completely new browser?