My First Look at RockMelt

RockMelt a new browser came out this week to a lot of fan fare from the main stream tech media.Robert Scoble did a good interviews with the creators of the browser which can be found on YouTube. The newest Net@Nite which should be available for download tomorrow (Nov 10, 2010) interviewed the cofounder and they asked some questions about how much personal information the company was caching and their security. Their basic answer was we’re not interested in personal information and they take security serious. Once the episode is available I would recommend watching it. I was lucky to receive a beta-invite yesterday afternoon and have been trying it out since then. There are a couple of things that I really like about Rockmelt, On the right hand side of the browser there is a side bar where you can put your favorite sites and as they update a ticker number goes up. If you click on the icon. A stream comes up showing the latest updates and you can key down through the updates. If you find something you like you simple click on it and the page pops up. If you want to share a site there is an icon at the top to share it on Twitter or Facebook . You can add sites manually or Rockmelt will nudge you if you visit a site a lot to add it. If you search for something and you use the RockMelt search pane a preview of the searches will come up and as you arrow down through them the pages on your browser windows change to the corresponding page. On the left hand side you see your Facebook connections, which you can arrange either by who is online or by your favorite contacts. If the person is online the dot next to their avatar will turn green. If you want to chat with the person you simply click on their avatar and a chat window comes up. If you want to share a link with someone, you can simply drag the link to their avatar and drop it.

There are a couple of negatives about RockMelt, the first is when you open up the browser you have to sign into Facebook. So if you are not into Facebook or Twitter this is definitely not the browser for you. Most extensions available in Chrome will work, however they are still having problems with some extensions like Lastpass and 1password. They are working to fix those problems as they are being reported. The one thing that is a little annoying is when you share something thru the RockMelt sharing app the number indicator on the icon goes up. I don’t really need to know that I just posted something. The browser did crash once today, but came back up right away other then that I haven’t had any technical problem that I am aware of.

So far I do like the browser, the connection to your social site is great and easy to use. I am not sure though how successful this will be in the long run, after all a social browser has been tried before, think Flock. If you already using a browser that you are happy with, is the integrated social media enough to change, I am not sure it is. However if you are into Facebook or Twitter I would recommend trying it. If you are interested in trying RockMelt I do have two invites available.