Andreesen Offers New Browser 'Rockmelt' 185
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.'"
$10 says this fails miserably (Score:2, Insightful)
An internet portal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Now, where have I heard that idea before... and how did that work out for them?
Flock? Chrome Extensions? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are nice Chrome extensions with Chromed Bird that allow you to easily pull down a menu of Tweets, and have new tweets pop-up. There are entire existing browser projects like Flock designed for this purpose.
Why do we need this?
We've seen this before (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems like the classic programmer issue of not googling before you code.
This exists! Not only are there plugins to chrome and firefox for this very purpose, but I believe there are at least 2 actual browsers (which no one uses) built around this idea.
This does not appear to do anything revolutionary, and certainly does not justify a completely new browser. This could easily have been implemented as an extension to existing browsers.
Re:$10 says this fails miserably (Score:5, Insightful)
so, basically... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Flock (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Flock (Score:5, Insightful)
A: $10 million in funding
Re:Flock (Score:3, Insightful)
Flock was my first though too.
And why the Flock hasn't cannibalized the FireFox might to be the response to the question why this are not so big news. Power of the web is the power of change: yesterday it was Altavista and news groups and Yahoo boards, today it is Facebook and Twitter and Google, but tomorrow it might be all gone replaced by some new trend in how we share and search for the information.
And the power of change is what would keep the specialized browsers in a niche for quite some time.
Re:Flock (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe someday it will be replaced by a large number of "pages" with useful content grouped into "sites" than can reference other useful content with "links".
Re:$10 says this fails miserably (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:We've seen this before (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
And thus you demonstrate that you have no clue how most people spend their time on the internet, and that you are clearly not the target market for this software.
That's fine. But, as is so common with Slashdotters, you presume that the tiny minority you are a part of somehow represents the majority of humanity. It's cute, but fantastically naive.
Re:Huh (Score:3, Insightful)
Because this is built over Chromium, which only exists for two years. And Flock was already 3 years old and perfectly usable by that time.
Re:$10 says this fails miserably (Score:4, Insightful)
You've been able to embed multiple sites and information sources in a single page since IFrames, which I'm fairly sure were a feature of one of unfinished portions of Babbage's Difference Engine. Web-based RSS? Similarly old news. Google search boxes? I'm pretty sure that Google's site has one of those... With all the Web 2.0 stuff the kids are going on about these days, you could probably even make such a shambling composite of a site look and feel fairly elegant.
There is probably that last 10% or so which cannot be done as a simple web page; but the pace of development and the rate of "creative inspiration" in the browser market is huge. If they come up with anything genuinely cool, it'll be a Firefox plugin in two days, a Chrome plugin just after that, a native Opera feature in the next point release(available in the beta version in three weeks, for the Opera die-hards) and being hailed as Steve Jobs' latest brilliant breakthrough in UI perfection in the release of Safari accompanying OSX 10.N+1...
The problem is not so much that he is wrong; but that being right on that point is going to be a very hard distinction to sell...
Re:An internet portal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:$10 says this fails miserably (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:An internet portal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Though you're right about Yahoo! branded properties with huge pageviews and a large installed userbase... But the elephant in the room is a property most people don't think of when they think Yahoo! - Flickr.
Google has tried to make a competitor, but like so many of their attempts outside of search they haven't really put much effort into it.
Re:Flock (Score:1, Insightful)
Are you suggesting that the site necessarily needs a gigantic plain-text bulleted list of things that it can do right in the middle of the page? The vast majority of people browsing the web nowadays (hint, it's the Facebook/MySpace/Twitter/Whatever crowd) have browsers that already have Flash installed, so watching an introductory video is not out of the question for them. This is a browser pointed at the people using those networks, who are generally not that computer savvy, who would (much rather, I'd say) watch a video to figure out if it was something they'd want to mess with rather than reading a list of points they may or may not understand.
Beyond that, if you're even remotely curious about what something can do, since when did the User Guide become an invalid source for information?
Re:$10 says this fails miserably (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Flock (Score:3, Insightful)