Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser company called RockMelt. Not much is known about RockMelt other than it is being designed by an all-star team (including software engineer Robert John Churchill from the Netscape days) and that it is tied into Facebook through Facebook Connect. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a screenshot of the sign-in page and speculates that RockMelt is in fact a Facebook browser. Miguel Helft at the NYT leans in that direction as well. It kind of makes sense since Andreesen is on the board of Facebook, but I suspect it is only half the story.
A Facebook browser, however, is a good metaphor for thinking about how browsers, in general, need to change. What would a Facebook browser look like? Well, to start with, you would be able to see updates from your friends on Facebook, share your own updates and media right from the browser, and perhaps IM with your friends through Facebook chat. While those set of features would be convenient, they are nothing revolutionary. Flock, which calls itself the social browser, already incorporates Facebook Connect (and Twitter and other social networks to boot), but it hasn’t taken off. And Facebook itself offers a toolbar for Firefox that lets you see notifications, search Facebook, and share links. There are plenty of other Firefox add-ons which incorporate Facebook features as well.
But the Facebook connection may just be the starting point for a much more ambitious piece of software. Andreesen said as much to the NYT in an interview earlier this year, which Helft quotes from in his article:
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.
What sorts of things is he talking about? Making the browser social appears to be at the top of the list. The first thing you do is connect to Facebook. But that could just be a building block for a social browser that handles Web apps in an entirely new way. The browser was built around the Web page metaphor, but increasingly the most interesting things happening on the Web do not necessarily exist on any one Web page. They exist in real time data streams (such as Facebook’s portable News Feed and Twitter) and in richer Webtop applications. A modern browser should be designed not only to surf the Web, but to manage your information streams and Web apps all in a seamless user interface.
Whether or not RockMelt is tackling this broader challenge, I don’t know. But I hope it is because we need to move the ball forward with a radical, yet accessible, new approach. Radical, yet accessible—that is the challenge. It must be radical enough to open up new, more efficient, avenues of information discovery, creation, and interaction. It must be a communications platform as well as a browsing platform.
The original browser model was one of consumption, of reading Web pages as if they were documents. Despite all the progress of the past decade, we are still stuck with that legacy to a large degree because it is built into our browsers. So what would a true social browser look like? Below is my own wish list of features (some of these are available as add-ons or in existing desktop clients, but there is an opportunity to unify them in one seamless experience):
- It would have multiple modes for browsing, search, following social data stream, and launching Web applications
- The home page would be a stream reader which brings together real time streams from across the Web (which Facebook now has with Friendfeed).
- IM, email, and public messages (status updates and Tweets) would be always accessible in the toolbar or a sidebar
- It would support a variety of Web apps which could be launched seamlessly within the browser without going to a Website and logging in.
- One-button access to sharing services of your choice (Flickr, Posterous, Youtube, Wordpress)
- Real-time search and alerts from across the Web (social stream, news, finance sites, sports sites, etc.)
- Support for Google Gears to give the browser offline capabilities as well as local caching and a light database for computing tasks
That’s just off the top of my head. If you were redesigning the browser from scratch today, what would it look like?
First question that comes to mind — Rendering engine, which one will it use?
FF
I just don’t see why we need – yet ANOTHER browser. Flock and Opera are hardly hammering market share and with
Chrome
IE
Safari
Firefox
The need for yet “another” browser seems just ridiculous. No one bothers to support these lackluster browsers that popup because there is just no point supporting yet another standard – and another rendering engine and more testing in more browsers.
The concept of a social browser – wow, great – hammering it against the other browsers (when per your techcrunch article most people dont even know what a browser is) to me just seems pointless. You have to have a serious distribution channel for new browsers to work and Opera and other existing players have tried for years to no “great” avail.
I just cant see it working on a mass scale – or even a minimal scale for that matter.
You don’t need a large market share to make money. Flock is making money. Hell, Blackbird is making enough to keep its doors open: http://www.tech...top-of-mozilla/
” No one bothers to support these lackluster browsers that popup because there is just no point supporting yet another standard – and another rendering engine and more testing in more browsers.”
God; I hate it when people come up with this. It didn’t make sense ten years ago, it doesn’t make sense today.
Do. not. support. browsers.
Support standards. They are all that matters.
A thousand browsers should be as easy to “support” as a thousand different brands of cars on the road.
If you build a site, if you adhere to standards and things don’t work, it’s not your problem. Point your fingers at the geniuses that built an inadequate browser.
And yes, this includes MS IE6.
This sounds great in theory, but just doesn’t work in practice. You can support standards all you want, but that means your sites won’t work for a large number of your customers. Sad, but true.
I hate IE6 as much as the next guy, but if a significant portion of my users are on IE6, I’m gonna make sure the site works on IE6.
So, no, please, no more browsers. The current market is competitive enough.
bah. Gecko is old and busted, Webkit is the new hotness.
What if everyone is looking at this wrong, what if they’re not only looking to make it social but what if they’re going to use the power of FB Connect inside the browser itself to allow you to go from site to site without having to keep logging into each site (your browser does it for you).
With FB Connect becoming such a highly used login method across the web maybe they’re looking to capitalize off of it and also add in other login features later. The simplicity of it could draw a lot of attention.
This sounds horrifyingly insecure.
I honestly don’t think you need a new BROWSER to do this. If Facebook Connect becomes standardized, other browsers would be able to implement the same connectivity and allow your login to spread across other pages. but as Shane said, it would have some serious security implications.
I think it’s time poorly spent, but it doesn’t matter – this is all speculation at this point.
I go from site to site and get logged in automatically right now. It’s called 1Password for the Mac. I believe every browser also has the ability to store passwords and auto-login – so really, there’s no need for a new browser to use that concept.
The browser would be centred around facebook. I think Google wave would have a better chance doing the same stuff in any browser.
After all these years , I love Firefox
Polar opposite of the chrome approach, which is basically hide the browser as much as possible.
Seems to me that this idea was cooked up in a vacuum by a group of guys who all smoke the same stuff.
“Hey, who in this room uses Facebook?” (all hands go up)
“Who in this room would like a better browser / facebook integration” (all hands go up)
Reality is that there are a bunch of us out there (like me) who don’t give a rat’s a$$ about facebook (except as it pertains to our income). I will resist facebook assimilation as long as I can. And I can last a long time.
Everyone was going to have a GeoCities page. And then everyone was going to have a MySpace page. Now everyone’s going to have a facebook page.
If I were Zukerberg, I’d be divesting and diversifying now, while facebook is hot. It takes about one google search to find thousands of entrepreneurs who stuck with their idea too long, watched it peak, and then rode it back down.
Continued investment in (or failure to divest from) Facebook will NOT outperform index funds – he needs to cash out in 2009/2010. Just watch.
I sure hope you are right. I like the comparison to GeoCities, then MySpace! It’s so true – Just hard to tell how this facebook thing will phase away.
Perhaps the whole notion of it being a “browser” is wrong — that directly ties back to the notion of passive reading rather than engaging.
Also,
dangit.
http://www.read...disturbance.gif
Yes. I think people are throwing virtual hissy-fits because the media has decided to characterize this as a ‘browser’ while that may be an inapt description.
Perhaps something more along the lines of Outlook, but utilizing XMPP instead of IMAP? Maybe HTTP support, maybe not.
Finally
Newsflash, they already have something like this. It’s called Flock! http://www.flock.com/
Or if you don’t want to switch browsers, you can get similar functionality in an add-on like Yoono http://www.yoono.com .
“There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch,” Mr. Andreessen said.
And yet, the evolution of the web continues to use the same damn markup that was conceived a long time ago. Sure, there have been a few modifications/additions over time, but nothing the browsers couldn’t keep up with.
Seriously, isn’t the bulleted-list of items just a packaged set of FF extensions? Maybe a more harmonious presentation in UI design, which would be nice. But really, is this the foundation for a company?
It is if you are in the SV echo chamber
it would be cool for each tab of a browser to adapt to the functionalities of the page i’m on. On facebook, it could be like Flock, on TechCrunch, it could offer faster commenting and sharing, etc.
Useless
I only care about Ning! How are they doing? And how does Mark have any time to help them become a great company?
I hate browsers that try to impose advertisement or allow other companies to impose their advertisements by installing toolbars. IE is the worst. I found 6 toolbars on my mom’s IE when I visited her. Those toolbars ate up the entire screen. What was really offensive was she, like most ordinary people, never knew how they got there. I installed Chrome for her and taught her never to use IE again.
With screen real estate at a premium, I heard Apple is working on a 3D browser that will “jump out” at you and appear 1.5 times larger than than the size of your monitor.
lol. yeah i have too get all these new toolbars and i hate it to so i just delete them all. i really used to be against using the google bar, but it’s proven useful at some point in time.
how’s chrome? i used to see prompts everywhere to install chrome, but i hadn’t seen anymore until i was checking out the google support section yesterday. will installing chrome make my life easier?
Do it bro, I urge you to do it. Chrome is so much cleaner and has no baggage. It is SUBSTANTIALLY and noticeably faster than IE & Firefox. I have never had a popup get past the Chrome blocker, which was built-in.
great!
this rockmelt image remindes me of the facebookk deathstar. they need another graphic. also change the text…despite the fact that it is rockmelt my brain keeps processing this as rock me IT.
I would want to give users more control of web content with advertising, That’s probably where Web browser technology will head to after we address the issue of “the web is not a portal any more”. Right now the urgent need for Web browser users is is to be able to do the things they do on the web efficiently and seamlessly …this include real-time data, social networks and media data and integrate well with other applications. There is probably room for several dozen web browsers because of what people are doing on the web today.
There’s already a Facebook browser: http://getfirefox.com/ Bonus: It also browses Google.
That’s a good one!:)
Seriously, Flock is already quite a good social web browser. On a different field, more related to private browsing you also have Ti-Took (titook.net).
Sounds more like the old webtop idea to me, with the addition of modern social applications. Calling it a browser gets away from that legacy term.
One reason Flock has never taken off – its board’s decision to fire the original founders (Bart Decrem and Geoffrey Arone ) and replace them with Shawn Hardin.
Is it me, or is the RockMelt logo a straight ripoff of Apple’s old .Mac logo? Side-by-side: http://su.pr/2p8XOR
no no it’s not you. i was thinking about why it looked familar and now i know why.
dont think you need a browser for your social needs. if needed, use a friendfeed-like feed as your home page. the web has to look the same no matter what device or browser you are accessing it from.
I keep reading this as Rock Me It
me too. and i don’t want it to rock me. i keep shaking my head at this graphic. it makes me kinda sad. who designed this? anyone know?
You know what this actually sounds like:
Google Wave
hahaha. yeah people will come up with that comparison.
If andresson endorses it, I’ll use it!
There are so many browsers out just like this one, but it is hard to say which one will succeed until launched. Since this one is primarily fixated around Facebook, it may have more of a chance because Facebook is a huge site with so many users. Personally, I will not be making any sort of switch any time soon.
The more the merrier.
I dont care what anyone says, I love the logo, font and name of it. Its such a cool logo, that I am going to try this just because of the branding. Plus I severly doubt this will be as integrated to facebook as everyone keeps saying, its pretty much like saying Digg is only about facebook because it has facebook connect and Kevin Rose has a facebook page. Plus no one actually knows anything yet its all speculation.
How about an operating system that links together your location, your contact list, your apps, together with your browser? That seems sort of what Android is about and what Iphone could be about. Add a facebook app running in the background and you basically have a Facebook browser. Add a Twitter app and you have a Twitter browser.
A Facebook browser would probably look like the old AOL browser–but customized for Facebook and just as aggravatingly limited.
I think it’s way too late. Google wave will smash this thing. I have a wave SDK account at the moment, and there are things they have implemented already that facebook desperately needs (like private comments, or threaded comments for that matter). I’ve actually gotten to the point where I am getting sick of facebook, it is way too hard to keep tabs on what is going on with just people I know let alone across the web.
Pretty much, normal people will never use his. Normal people don’t even use FBC. What the heck are you thinking?
“If you were redesigning the browser from scratch today, what would it look like?”
Warning: much dreamy-eyed, idealistic commentary will follow. You might not even recognize this as me, since no one’s ever seen much of this dreamy side I possess.
Not important what it would look like – it’s what it would do. The idea of using a browser for text is antiquated and extremely limiting for blogs, newspapers, and web personalities alike, and the alternatives are each just as limiting in their own ways.
The browser of my dreams would be able to take my blogs (just as a small example) and give my “readers” the choice to make them fully interactive – if they don’t want audio, text-to-speech, music clips, sound effects, text-transform effects, video animations, image animations, and so on, they can choose to not interact with such media by hitting a checkbox for “text version only”.
So the blog would function both as traditional text media and as a platform for much richer data.
Let me use a small paragraph from my personal blog as an example. I wrote recently in Portals Are Not Dead:
“Portals are not dead. Portals can never be dead. If you think portals are dead you have no imagination, nor do you grasp the meaning of the word:
portal:”
In that example, in my ideal browser, there would be web code I could have used next to the link for “portal” that would allow me to place a tiny icon next to that word as well; if you were to hover over the icon, a video would play inline of me defining the word “portal” myself, and perhaps adding wise-cracks about what the word doesn’t mean, and so on.
Features like that, along with features like “audio-on-hover” to hear either me or a browser-equivalent voice speak portions of or else the entire page out loud, along with the ability to use transition effects on image-hover to draw “readers” into downright “mesmerizing” interactive experiences, would make web pages richer, more “in-focus”, and easier to get hooked on. I’m thinking an almost 3-D experience – without the glasses – of course.
I’ve been dreaming this dream for the last 3 years (it came to me one night when I imagined myself “walking around” the almost 3-D design of a blog I kept one summer) and I really can’t wait to see at least a small portion of it come true someday.
I think if the HTML 5 spec works smoothly in future releases of today’s browsers that it’s the closest thing we will get to what I want, but it’s not there yet, and it gives us no answer to lack of backward compatibility in older browsers (all browsers are going to age rather rapidly once the HTML 5 spec arrives).
Now that I’ve disposed of that, I will return to being a curmudgeon…sorry.
I think that focusing a lot on social media can be a good idea, but I dont think that social websites are not everything that the net has to offer. As there are countless functions and ways people can share information through the net, I think that instead of focusing mainly on the social media, the browser should focus more on enabling the browser to be editable to suit the user’s information needs.
You misspelled Andreessen numerous times in your story.
The only reason why Flock has never taken off is because hardly anyone knows about it! Because they are such a small outfit (with very little in the way of marketing clout) they have to rely on their users to ’spread the word’ as it were, and that all takes time.
I use Flock, and its a brilliant concept. Not only has it got Facebook integration (fully with Facebook chat as well) but also twitter,myspace,flickr,picassa,blogger,gmail.AOL,yahoo,etc. So it puzzles me why when their is a browser that already does all this, everyone gets excited by something which is just the same thing!
With everything going viral these days…if Flock is good it won’t need much marketing. Look how fast Twibbon.com grew simply by leveraging the Twitter audience.
It could be useful. Although I’m pretty happy with Firefox, so RockMelt will really have to kick butt to make me switch. The name is corny though – RockMelt? Lame.
Dear Marc Andreesen,
What are you thinking?
Cheers,
Matt
another browser, oh no how crazy, we all love IE in all its flavors and firefox doesn’t hang and crash at all. Chrome is cute too but has no plugins but is super fast, safari, flock and opera are cool too…do we need more
Pretty obvious Facebook wants to wallgarden your ass ala AOL style.
p/s No one takes Facebook Connect users seriously… seriously!
Don’t know about “ala AOL style”, but I ditched my Facebook account ’cause it just got too difficult to keep up with their privacy policies. But I think a whole lot of people really don’t care whether a Facebook, or Google, or knows where you are and what you are doing. Sad.
I think that in addition to all these ideas for a new kind of browser, what is going to give also a shape to a new way to interact with Internet, will be the Semantic Web and a growing use of command line interface that already has started for example with the Ubiquity extension from Firefox.
Interesting. Hope it delivers something new we can use.
I’m really curious about this RockMelt and excited as well.
Check out EasySecured Browser…Mr Andreessen I need funding too…. lol
I’m not a facebook user but can see the implication of this in the near future. Depending if it adds something significant which is more compliant with facebook.
Think off it what facebook has now and the range of apps you can create with it and the service being combined with the browser is far more easy.
Maybe Web 3.0 comes in range using some of their services and social connections who nows if they succeed the next browser war is on again but thats just me jiving gg.
I dont mind another browser. There’s room for improvement with all the current browsers, so if another one comes along and is better, great. My biggest problem is this attachment to facebook. I dont see why a browser needs to be wed to a social website like this. Not everyone in the world is that facebook obsessed.