wirelessjb writes to share that after a resounding defeat at the hands of Microsoft in the first major browser war of the mid 1990s, Marc Andreessen is looking to have another go at the market by backing a new startup called "RockMelt.""Mr. Andreessen suggested the new browser would be different, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the Web, which had grown from an array of static Web pages into a network of complex Web sites and applications. 'There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch,' Mr. Andreessen said.
RockMelt was co-founded by Eric Vishria and Tim Howes, both former executives at Opsware, a company that Mr. Andreessen co-founded and then sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for about $1.6 billion. Mr. Howes also worked at Netscape with Mr. Andreessen."
I wouldn't. I'd dump most of the custom GUI features in Chrome and Firefox, and quit screwing around with the stuff around the browser window. It's the stuff inside the browser window that you actually care about, not whether the icons are grey metal or jello blue.
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday August 14, @04:51PM (#29071509)
You mean completely useless and pointless things around the content like favorite & history menus and tabs too, right? I wish people would quit wasting time coming up with that nonsense and get back to the 'stuff inside the browser window'...
I'll even go back to your themes point and argue that. As hard as it is for the common/.er to process, we are humans and not machines. People love their colors and themes. When my mom, grandmother, uncle and other aunt got a new computer, I got the inevitable "you work with computers, right" call and every single last one of them had in their top 5 "how to" questions: Can't I change the picture behind my icon thingies? How do I do that?
Never underestimate the human desire to want to make their world their own. Even when they know they aren't.
You work with computers, right? How do I set up my machine to display not "color", per se, but to be more visible for the "color blind". See, I fail all color vision tests - can't see red or green. I don't CARE about the colors so much, as I just want important stuff to be sharp and clear. (Why on earth does everyone use red to color "important shitzls", when red just fades into the backgroud? Use a nice electric blue - make it flash - THAT will get my attention!!)
Alright, maybe I'm just mocking "normal" people. Whatever. But, it's fair to point out that eye candy isn't a priority with everyone.;-)
I think you might want the high contrast inverse theme on GNOME. Not sure if the colors are right (not being color-blind myself) but it has good contrast.
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday August 14, @07:31PM (#29072741)
Red wouldn't fade into the background if you could see it. Red is such a frightening color because it's the color of blood, so every time you see it, it looks like something's bleeding a little. It's horrifying really. Be glad you can't see it.
Not just colors. Work with a netbook and you'll learn to value minimized themes with tiny buttons and the ability to cram two toolbars in next to the menu bar. Netbooks put vertical real estate at a premium and anything that helps me reduce the browser chrome's vertical footprint dramatically improves the browser's usefulness (from "useless" to "almost decent").
Likewise, OSes that natively support theming (ur a UXTheme-hacked Windows) are a very good thing because every vertical pixel I can shave off the
You mean completely useless and pointless things around the content like favorite & history menus and tabs too, right?
I personally think a UI for these things in any way different than a web page of links is silly. If we can come up with a better way of navigating links to web pages, then the rest of the web should work that way, too.
I doubt anyone that uses Chrome cares about how it looks. The reason I use it is because it's as fast as Firefox 1.0 was. Now that Firefox 3.5 takes 30 seconds to start and crashes constantly (on Linux at least), I'd rather use a browser that's fast and stable (and yes, Chrome on Linux is still pre-alpha and it's more stable than Firefox).
The Mozilla devs seem to give the Linux version of Firefox very little love. I've been secretly hoping for a Qt version of Firefox for ages, which supposedly Nokia was working on. They said they did the bulk of the port in a month, but then it never seemed to finish/surface. But now there are browsers like rekonq and Arora which are very small, and extremely fast. Rekonq is eventually moving to a per-process design like Chrome, and integrates well with KDE.
Remove ALL GUIs that use traditional windows/dialogs/menus and make them all like PVR OSD menus that are easy to use, look pretty and most of call can be accessed by a remote control or touch screen easily. Use overlays with transparency for status bars/widgets/addons.
I also just pulled up Safari on Windows, and it uses the same number of elements as Firefox, and almost an identical UI.
You have the menu-bar.
Below that you have navigation links next to the address bar, and then the search bar. Below that is the bookmark menu (which I almost always turn off).
Safari uses smaller icons than Firefox by default, but Firefox makes it easier to install a theme with smaller icons.
by Anonymous Coward
on Friday August 14, @04:39PM (#29071353)
What's the profit model for this startup? That's the most interesting question, to me.
According to the various articles, RockMelt will attempt strong integration with social networking sites. So I would assume the profit model is mining users' privacy and selling advertising.
Who are the people proposing this and do they not understand the "plug-in" concept as demonstrated in most browsers, but especially well in Firefox? Firefox offers such extensive addon customization that one wonders what more could possibly be done with a new browser rather than simply writing an addon? Why should strong social network integration be "built in" to the browser anyway? That is what addons are for. This sounds like the sort of idea that a business person, who had little or no knowledge of software engineering, would propose. What is surprising is that someone like Marc would fall for it. As for the investors in this startup, well, "the fools and their money will soon be parted company"; perhaps that is what Marc intends to do from the start, separate foolish investors from their money.
Your mind is not able to think very far, is it? Like those Star Trek "aliens"*. Or "new and innovative" car models that look *freakin exactly* like the old ones, so you have to look twice to even see the difference!
It's so very common that I see people coming up with things that they call great innovative thinking, and I can show them multiple boxes and outdated philosophies that they still think inside of, on the spot.
Chrome is still showing HTML pages in tabs that you navigate trough with the virtual interface of links, a history to move through, etc, and a physical interface of the mouse and keyboard. In a window. With no new widgets, concepts, philosophies, or anything new of any kind. And we're not talking about two years. We're talking about time span since Mosaic 1.0 in 1993. Because other than the Addons or Firefox and Greasemonkey, pretty much nothing innovative in browsers has appeared or changed since then. (Maybe Flock was an approach. But it was a half-assed one, and failed because of that.)
___ * I really liked the show, but I hated what they called extraterrestrial, including the "explanation".
Chrome is still showing HTML pages in tabs that you navigate trough with the virtual interface of links, a history to move through, etc, and a physical interface of the mouse and keyboard. In a window.
Ha! So true! Those hidebound sheep, still using HTML (instead of XIEJD), tabs (instead of buckets), links (instead of jellybeans), history (instead of triple-reverse history), a physical mouse/keyboard interface (instead of magnetic-induction frontal-cortex implants). In windows (instead of architectural glass blocks)! They really should get with the times.
Chrome has a fast JS engine. It separates plug-ins so they can't crash the browser. The interface doesn't get in your way. It sandboxes everything for security. It integrates Gears to use web apps offline.
What is this start-up going to do that Chrome doesn't do?
I haven't read the article, but if I was going with a start-up today, I'd build around Chromium to start, but port it to Qt to use one code-base on all platforms. With the per-process design, you could even call different versions
Each process is placed in a sandbox to protect your security and privacy.
Jails/partitions, or just chroot? What, on Windows?
Or do you mean the javascript engine is a separate instance (because it's a separate process) so they're sandboxed from each other because they're in different processes. Which is a good thing, but describing it as putting each PROCESS in a sandbox is misleading as hell.
The Rockmelt website isn't too interesting. It's a bit presumptuous to assume it will get a/.ing. Perhaps it is suffering from the Marketing Dept assuming people will come back later in the hope of revelation, rather than them saying "ooh nice logo" and then instantly forgetting about them and moving along.
Bad juju replying to my own post but this is just a product placement ad. There is no substance whatsoever about what is actually different with this browser. There are no details either in either of the links. Surely money changed hands to put this drivel on/.
That article was so light on on content all that we can summarize is that RockMelt is another browser. A browser with a creative name, that has a "browser rock star" who is backing it, and one that has some new "plug-in" features with Facebook. So why am I lacking any excitement by this? Correct me if I'm wrong but it's not like Andreessen is a Steve Job's visionary or anything.
"Little else is known about RockMelt, and Mr. Vishria was unwilling to discuss it. "We are at very early stages of development," Mr. Vishria said. "Talking about it at this stage is not useful."
Good thing it was on Slashdot where nothing is useful.
This "article" is just another marketing ploy for some vapourware. Can't you see that? By gum,/. isn't the same these days 8) There are a couple of good jokes in this topic but in the end this is all just an exercise in promotion and we are it's semi willing participants, breathing life into the marketing machine.
IT'S ALL JUST BOLLOCKS - I WANT NEWS ON MY/. NOT THIS SHIT.
The big story here is Mr. Andreessen is backing a browser product, a market thought to be dead and buried in terms of profit. He was profiled in Forbes a while back and his name resonates with the financial types. He has credibility with investors because he called Facebook and Twitter (among others) as a buy pretty early in their lifecycles.
Corollary, the Forbes article mentions that he has a crap-ton of OPM to invest now, so he can afford to take some long-shots.
-ellie
You just don't get it, you'll be able to update and SEE your twitter feed and facebook page from your browser! No other browser lets you see facebook and twitter, its going to blow YOUR MIND!
What does he mean that most browsers aren't keeping pace with the web? By definition, browsers define the pace of the web. If your browser can't see it then it doesn't exist yet.
There's no one out there making a good living by creating webpages that browsers can't display.
Judging from what little was revealed in TFA, I guess RockMelt more or less requires you to have a Facebook account, and to use a Facebook login to access RockMelt's features. Talk about bundling! So rather than be an agnostic client agent to surf the web, RockMelt is going to serve as a portal to funnel you, the user, through a specific service before you get anywhere else. I'm sure Andreesen is also betting that this will funnel more dollars into his pockets, since he will create a more captive audience for his service.
No thanks, not a fan of lock-in of any kind. Also not a fan of most social networking services, which is why I have avoided Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et. al.
Once on a flight, I was reading a book about web standards, and the guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation. He said that he knew a lot about the web, joining Netscape in 1995 and staying near the end, being one of the last two or three employees. He said that Netscape was undone because upper management got extremely arrogant over their initial dominance in the browser market. They thought nobody, not even Microsoft could take them down.
He said they would laugh at feature requests by users, play foosball and drink beer all day...basically one big party while IE slowly and surely crushed them.
Based on this, I would be very wary that anyone associated with the original Netscape has the management skills to make a new browser a success.
Today, most of what we use the web for on a day-to-day basis aren't just web pages, they're applications. Wouldn't it be great, then, to start from scratch, and design something based on the needs of today's web applications and today's users? --Google, [google.com] 9/2/2008 [slashdot.org]
And from today's FA:
But Mr. Andreessen suggested the new browser would be different, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the Web, which had grown from an array of static Web pages into a network of complex Web sites and applications. "There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch," Mr. Andreessen said. --Marc Andreessen, 8/13/2009 [nytimes.com]
It's as if he fell asleep reading the comic, dreamt about it, and woke up thinking he had an original idea. Then again, TFA says he said "most other browsers", so maybe he's specifically excluding Chrome?:-)
May I say (Score:5, Insightful)
Netscape's interface was the best
Long live Seamonkey
Re:May I say (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:May I say (Score:4, Funny)
No, that's German for, 'The Seamonkey, The.'
No one who speaks German could be an evil man.
Parent
Chrome 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
'There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch,' Mr. Andreessen said.
Yeah, I'd build a browser more like... Chrome. Which addressed this issue less than two years ago. Has the web changed a lot in two years?
What's the profit model for this startup? That's the most interesting question, to me.
Re:Chrome 2 (Score:4, Funny)
I imagine Marc Andreessen has enough change in his sofa cushions to keep a startup going for decades.
Parent
Chrome 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd build a browser more like... Chrome.
I wouldn't. I'd dump most of the custom GUI features in Chrome and Firefox, and quit screwing around with the stuff around the browser window. It's the stuff inside the browser window that you actually care about, not whether the icons are grey metal or jello blue.
Parent
Re:Chrome 0 (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean completely useless and pointless things around the content like favorite & history menus and tabs too, right? I wish people would quit wasting time coming up with that nonsense and get back to the 'stuff inside the browser window'...
I'll even go back to your themes point and argue that. As hard as it is for the common /.er to process, we are humans and not machines. People love their colors and themes. When my mom, grandmother, uncle and other aunt got a new computer, I got the inevitable "you work with computers, right" call and every single last one of them had in their top 5 "how to" questions: Can't I change the picture behind my icon thingies? How do I do that?
Never underestimate the human desire to want to make their world their own. Even when they know they aren't.
Parent
Re:Chrome 0 (Score:5, Insightful)
You work with computers, right? How do I set up my machine to display not "color", per se, but to be more visible for the "color blind". See, I fail all color vision tests - can't see red or green. I don't CARE about the colors so much, as I just want important stuff to be sharp and clear. (Why on earth does everyone use red to color "important shitzls", when red just fades into the backgroud? Use a nice electric blue - make it flash - THAT will get my attention!!)
Alright, maybe I'm just mocking "normal" people. Whatever. But, it's fair to point out that eye candy isn't a priority with everyone. ;-)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Chrome 0 (Score:5, Funny)
Red wouldn't fade into the background if you could see it. Red is such a frightening color because it's the color of blood, so every time you see it, it looks like something's bleeding a little. It's horrifying really. Be glad you can't see it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Likewise, OSes that natively support theming (ur a UXTheme-hacked Windows) are a very good thing because every vertical pixel I can shave off the
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally think a UI for these things in any way different than a web page of links is silly. If we can come up with a better way of navigating links to web pages, then the rest of the web should work that way, too.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Chrome 0 (Score:5, Interesting)
The Mozilla devs seem to give the Linux version of Firefox very little love. I've been secretly hoping for a Qt version of Firefox for ages, which supposedly Nokia was working on. They said they did the bulk of the port in a month, but then it never seemed to finish/surface. But now there are browsers like rekonq and Arora which are very small, and extremely fast. Rekonq is eventually moving to a per-process design like Chrome, and integrates well with KDE.
Parent
my ultimate tip suggestion (Score:3, Interesting)
Remove ALL GUIs that use traditional windows/dialogs/menus and make them all like PVR OSD menus that
are easy to use, look pretty and most of call can be accessed by a remote control or touch screen easily.
Use overlays with transparency for status bars/widgets/addons.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I also just pulled up Safari on Windows, and it uses the same number of elements as Firefox, and almost an identical UI.
You have the menu-bar.
Below that you have navigation links next to the address bar, and then the search bar. Below that is the bookmark menu (which I almost always turn off).
Safari uses smaller icons than Firefox by default, but Firefox makes it easier to install a theme with smaller icons.
Re:Chrome 2 (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the profit model for this startup? That's the most interesting question, to me.
According to the various articles, RockMelt will attempt strong integration with social networking sites. So I would assume the profit model is mining users' privacy and selling advertising.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Finally! I hate having to download all that spyware myself.
Re:Chrome 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Flock already integrates with social networking sites. IE8 does this as well.
I think you're correct that the point of RockMelt is to monetize this.
Re:Chrome 2 (Score:5, Interesting)
Your mind is not able to think very far, is it? Like those Star Trek "aliens"*. Or "new and innovative" car models that look *freakin exactly* like the old ones, so you have to look twice to even see the difference!
It's so very common that I see people coming up with things that they call great innovative thinking, and I can show them multiple boxes and outdated philosophies that they still think inside of, on the spot.
Chrome is still showing HTML pages in tabs that you navigate trough with the virtual interface of links, a history to move through, etc, and a physical interface of the mouse and keyboard. In a window. With no new widgets, concepts, philosophies, or anything new of any kind. And we're not talking about two years. We're talking about time span since Mosaic 1.0 in 1993. Because other than the Addons or Firefox and Greasemonkey, pretty much nothing innovative in browsers has appeared or changed since then. (Maybe Flock was an approach. But it was a half-assed one, and failed because of that.)
___
* I really liked the show, but I hated what they called extraterrestrial, including the "explanation".
Parent
Re:Chrome 2 (Score:5, Funny)
So how bout you drop some of that wisdom on us Merlin, instead of just fucking telling us we are stupid.
Parent
Re:Chrome 2 (Score:4, Funny)
Ha! So true! Those hidebound sheep, still using HTML (instead of XIEJD), tabs (instead of buckets), links (instead of jellybeans), history (instead of triple-reverse history), a physical mouse/keyboard interface (instead of magnetic-induction frontal-cortex implants). In windows (instead of architectural glass blocks)! They really should get with the times.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly my thoughts.
Chrome has a fast JS engine. It separates plug-ins so they can't crash the browser. The interface doesn't get in your way. It sandboxes everything for security. It integrates Gears to use web apps offline.
What is this start-up going to do that Chrome doesn't do?
I haven't read the article, but if I was going with a start-up today, I'd build around Chromium to start, but port it to Qt to use one code-base on all platforms. With the per-process design, you could even call different versions
Sandboxes? (Score:3, Insightful)
Each process is placed in a sandbox to protect your security and privacy.
Jails/partitions, or just chroot? What, on Windows?
Or do you mean the javascript engine is a separate instance (because it's a separate process) so they're sandboxed from each other because they're in different processes. Which is a good thing, but describing it as putting each PROCESS in a sandbox is misleading as hell.
You hear that Mr. Andreessen? (Score:5, Funny)
Marc: My name... is RockMelt!
Re:You hear that Mr. Andreessen? (Score:4, Funny)
Yep and it will feature a new scripting language called LavaScript.
Parent
The web site appears to have melted (Score:4, Insightful)
The Rockmelt website isn't too interesting. It's a bit presumptuous to assume it will get a /.ing. Perhaps it is suffering from the Marketing Dept assuming people will come back later in the hope of revelation, rather than them saying "ooh nice logo" and then instantly forgetting about them and moving along.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad juju replying to my own post but this is just a product placement ad. There is no substance whatsoever about what is actually different with this browser. There are no details either in either of the links. Surely money changed hands to put this drivel on /.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Tim Howes (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Tim Howes (Score:5, Funny)
Well, now I know which browser to avoid. Thanks for the warning!
Parent
It looks like a browser, it smells like a browser (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It looks like a browser, it smells like a brows (Score:4, Funny)
Good thing it was on Slashdot where nothing is useful.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This "article" is just another marketing ploy for some vapourware. Can't you see that? By gum, /. isn't the same these days 8) There are a couple of good jokes in this topic but in the end this is all just an exercise in promotion and we are it's semi willing participants, breathing life into the marketing machine.
IT'S ALL JUST BOLLOCKS - I WANT NEWS ON MY /. NOT THIS SHIT.
Re:It looks like a browser, it smells like a brows (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Its going to be off the hook! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Its going to be off the hook! (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Keeping Pace with the Web (Score:5, Insightful)
There's no one out there making a good living by creating webpages that browsers can't display.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
There's no one out there making a good living by creating webpages that browsers can't display.
I thought that was the definition of an IE-centric web developer.
Blink (Score:5, Funny)
it better support Linux (Score:5, Funny)
not learning from history? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure someone already made Flock. :)
Man burns left hand on stove, will now try right (Score:4, Funny)
I just checked the date, I thought for sure it must be April 1st.
Marc Andreessen is jumping into the browser wars again? What's next, Ford announces a "re-imagined" Edsel?
Might be based on Chrome (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.mail-archive.com/scalr-discuss@googlegroups.com/msg02866.html [mail-archive.com]
The same guy asked questions on the Chromium mailing list, "helping a co-worker get the chromium src".
http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/105e19e8d4f6c650?pli=1 [google.com]
Probably nothing, but could be something...
The Facebook requirement kills it for me (Score:3)
Judging from what little was revealed in TFA, I guess RockMelt more or less requires you to have a Facebook account, and to use a Facebook login to access RockMelt's features. Talk about bundling! So rather than be an agnostic client agent to surf the web, RockMelt is going to serve as a portal to funnel you, the user, through a specific service before you get anywhere else. I'm sure Andreesen is also betting that this will funnel more dollars into his pockets, since he will create a more captive audience for his service.
No thanks, not a fan of lock-in of any kind. Also not a fan of most social networking services, which is why I have avoided Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et. al.
My thoughts on Netscape (Score:3, Interesting)
Once on a flight, I was reading a book about web standards, and the guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation. He said that he knew a lot about the web, joining Netscape in 1995 and staying near the end, being one of the last two or three employees. He said that Netscape was undone because upper management got extremely arrogant over their initial dominance in the browser market. They thought nobody, not even Microsoft could take them down.
He said they would laugh at feature requests by users, play foosball and drink beer all day...basically one big party while IE slowly and surely crushed them.
Based on this, I would be very wary that anyone associated with the original Netscape has the management skills to make a new browser a success.
flock 2.0? (Score:3, Insightful)
we all know how popular flock turned out to be.
YOU'VE GOT TO BE FUCKING SHITTING ME!!! (Score:4, Informative)
PAGE FUCKING ONE:
Today, most of what we use the web for on a day-to-day basis aren't just web pages, they're applications. Wouldn't it be great, then, to start from scratch, and design something based on the needs of today's web applications and today's users?
--Google, [google.com] 9/2/2008 [slashdot.org]
And from today's FA:
But Mr. Andreessen suggested the new browser would be different, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the Web, which had grown from an array of static Web pages into a network of complex Web sites and applications. "There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch," Mr. Andreessen said.
--Marc Andreessen, 8/13/2009 [nytimes.com]
It's as if he fell asleep reading the comic, dreamt about it, and woke up thinking he had an original idea. Then again, TFA says he said "most other browsers", so maybe he's specifically excluding Chrome? :-)
It seems... (Score:4, Funny)
Someone has forgotten the first rule of Loudcloud.
Parent