RockMelt: A browser build for Social Networking!

RockMelt is re-imagining the online experience by 
creating a new web browser that makes it easy to stay 
in touch with friends, search online, and get updates 
from your favorite websites. 

RockMelt, a company backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen which has been under wraps until today, is trying to build a new browsing experience from the ground up. RockMelt is built first and foremost for sharing. You browse with your friends (the first thing you do is log into Facebook and your favorite friends and their latest status updates are always available along the left rail). And there is a big “Share” button up top, which lets you share any webpage, along with images and a preview, on Facebook. You could call it a Facebook browser, but it really is more than that. The three biggest changes to the browser that you notice with RockMelt is that it is built around friends, feeds, and search results. The left rail is for friend. The right rail is for sites. And the top rail is for search.

Your Facebook friends browse with you along the left-hand rail. You can select your most important or closest Facebook friends, and their faces are always there with you along with an indication whether they are online or not. If you hover over a face, their latest status update pops up. click on their face and you get a box showing their Facebook stream in the top half, and a chat box in the bottom. So it acts as an IM client using Facebook chat (see screenshot below). You even get inline images and video, which you don’t normally get in Facebook chat. If your friend is offline, you can send him or her a Facebook message.

Overall, RockMelt seems really fast. It is built on Chromium, the same open source browser that forms the foundation of Google’s Chrome browser. Given the fact that it is backed by Andreessen and Ron Conway, Bill Campbell, Josh Kopelman, and Diane Green and its principle architect was also the principle architect of the Netscape browser.

Download RockMelt