Browser Wars

This week I read about a new web browser RockMelt, currently in beta, and built on Google's Chrome. So I signed up for an invite and I now I get to try it out. My immediate take? It's a web browser with apps. In particular a major dose of Facebook. As I've mentioned before I'm not the biggest user of Facebook these days, so for me this was not the biggest attraction. (I have begun to suspect that I may be a FB hater and am just waiting for something new to come along to crush them like they did MySpace, and as MySpace did to Friendster before that. And don't get me started on the supposed "Gmail killer" that Facebook is said to be unleashing in the days ahead).

Excuse my digression.

Thus far, the most noticeable difference with RockMelt is the integration of apps on the browser. You automatically are logged into Facebook and on the left screen of the screen it shows the status of all of your "friends" on FB too. On the right of the screen are the other apps, if you import the bookmarks from your preferred browser, in my case Firefox, RockMelt picks up on which of those sites you visit the most and you can choose those as apps or feefs and it will let you know how many new items have been posted to those sites, you can click and get a snapshots of a blog post, tweet, or the latest yelp review. Whatever you like.

I'm not completely blown away by this new browser and I'm not going to offer you an in-depth review, I'll leave that to the good folks over on Gizmodo and Mashable. I'm just you know the end user and I'll play around with it some more and see if it makes it into my top 2 browsers.