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.'"
Re:$10 says this fails miserably (Score:4, Interesting)
Except Andreesen didn't write it, his VC firm funded it. Considering Andreesen has also invested heavily in Digg and Twitter, I'd say he has a decent track record there.
Re:You log in to RockMelt (Score:4, Interesting)
Original Blog Post (Score:3, Interesting)
This blog post [rockmelt.com] is the source of the story. Some quotes:
"Share or tweet links often? Yeah, us too. No more wading through each site’s goofy share widget or copy-pasting URLs. We built sharing directly into the browser, right next to the URL bar. Like a site or story? Click “Share” and BAM – link shared."
"Behind the scenes, RockMelt is always working on your behalf. Do you visit the same site 10 times a day, checking for new posts or updates? Well, RockMelt keeps track of all your favorite sites for you, alerting you when a new story comes out, a friend posts new pictures, or a new video is available. And when you open a RockMelt feed, the content is already waiting for you."
None of this sounds world shattering.
"Your friends are important to you, so we built them in. Now you’re able to chat, share that piano-playing-cat video everyone’s going to love, or just see what your friends are up to, regardless of what site you’re on."
Browsing together with friends and commenting is promising. Others have tried and failed, but maybe they can get it right. Some more analysis at the reg [theregister.co.uk].
Re:$10 says this fails miserably (Score:4, Interesting)
invested heavily in Digg and Twitter
he has a decent track record there.
So which is it?
Re:Flock (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe you missed the text "Built for Facebook and Twitter" under the giant Download button in the middle of the page or the "Watch the video to learn more" link right under that. Or are you still using Lynx?
This. is. Slash-daaaat!
C'mon, AC. We're supposed to browse with modern graphical browsers manually tweaked to turn off flash and any images. Videos links where we expect transcripts for TFAs are stringently dismissed.
Joking aside, they have a huge IMG box that repels us because it looks like flash and has PNG-images rather than text covering browser-purpose soundbites. The only text inside is "I agree..." and the popup video link. We skip watching because video reviews and conferences cannot be skimmed. Besides, Noscript has some hurdles if you click it.
I say geeks will kinda hate the site if they don't have a repo in their OS, and only geeks and their kin/locally-supported-sheep will get to flock to Flock. The rest of the world coming into the site from IE is clicking through from Wikipedia and won't care to try it out.
Re:Flock (Score:3, Interesting)
No man that's not even close to the sort of thing I'm talking about. The clue is in the name: "User Guide". I'm not a user, should I be?
Why are you defending this obviously stupid design decision? Do you make websites like this? If you do, please stop.