Doing My Best… a Web Developers Blog

RockMelt Browser – Future of Browsers?

I recently have installed the RockMelt browser and I have to be honest, I'm somewhat impressed. It's based off of the webkit engine, same look and feel as Google chrome browser, but with integrated social networking.

To be honest, this feels like the future of everything, right? Our phones are like this, our desktop widgets, the websites we go to all have 'Like This' or 'Tweet This' - so why not our browser?

What I think is done well, is the little side widget aka 'App Edge' - that allows me to quickly see the latest Facebook news updates, and then another one that is for notifications.

Not to mention the App Edge allows for easy (and I mean EASY) RSS subscriptions, allowing for even more ease to keep up to date. Add in the the left side 'friend edge' - where I can "star" my favorite friends on Facebook and easily chat or post to their wall. Or I can browse through all of my friends, see if they're online, etc.

But it's not all sunshine and rainbows...

RockMelt, while impressive, in its current state feels like it could be easily replaced by an addon to Google Chrome. I have yet to see anything that truly makes it impossible to clone without some trickery of an addon package. If Google could allow for Chrome addons, they could easily kill RockMelt, as they already have a huge acceptance. I could imagine though, that Google would want to reserve this tactic if they ever were to release a social network.

All in all, I'll be using RockMelt, and hope for some more major addon releases.

Tags: browsers, rockmelt, social networking