RockMelt Enters the Browser Wars

Let's go and talk a little bit about a browser that's made the news recently. And by recently I mean in early November of two. Thank you. We do have lots of people who catch up, That's true. They go through the entire archive, so somebody awesome. And then that means that every time we get that wave, we get the people writing in and saying, hey, whatever happened to the old listener mail intro? We wanted to talk a little bit about rock melt. Yes, now I wrote about

rock Melts and the blog. You do read our blog, don't you? Um? Some time ago? At that point, it was a few months ago now, and it was one of those things that people were sort of starting to talk about the possibility of a new browser coming on the scene to compete with the already entrenched Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Now. Part of the reason that people were talking about this was the involvement of a certain gentleman who um is certainly no newcomer to the browser

wars and that would be Mark and Yes. Yes uh so. Mr. Andreeson was one of the people who developed Netscape, the Netscape Internet Browser, yes, and before it, the Mosaic Web browser, which many of our listeners may not even be familiar with. It was a project um that started within basically as a school project, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, um and it was pretty much the first viable web browser. Um. I say pretty much because I forgot to go look and find that out. But I'm almost certain that it

is the first viable browser. And it did turn in it did involve the evolve into the the Netscape commercial web browser. Um and uh. Of course Mr Andreason dropped out of the spotlight for that particular thing, went on to become a tech entrepreneur, moved on to other projects, and now he is one of the investors in Rock Melt. Yeah.

The story was broken back in August of two thousand nine my Miguel Health over UM and and at the New York Times, and he mentioned that uh, that Andreason had decided to put some money, invest some money into this this startup venture, and the product was going to be called rock Melt. Now at the time, back in two thousand nine, there were very very few details about

the browser that that we were privy to. But even then we knew that it was going to be a web browser and that it was going to have some form of integration with Facebook. Yes, that that it was going to require that you sign in through a Facebook I D in order to use the browser UM, which is interesting that we we actually knew that much detail back then. It was also interesting that it was apparently news to Facebook, or at least that's that's you know.

The executives that that helped tried to contact said that they had no involvement with rock Melt whatsoever. Well, I think one of the things to point out about that UM is that may not be such a big surprise considering the availability of the application programming interface yes a p I UH from Facebook. Basically, you can bake a

lot of Facebook connectivity into your project. Of there are different kinds of project web projects, and in this case of software project um without because Facebook has already made that available, so they don't necessarily have to have that upfront. They can already be working on that without uh, you know, giving Facebook the heads up. So you might wonder, well, what would possess Mr andrees and to invest a significant

amount of money into a new browser? After all, as Chris was pointing out, the browser market has no shortage of contenders. Yes, I mean you still have Internet Explorer, which is still the dominant browser on the market, although its share is declining. It's no, it's no longer um, it's no longer I would say that it's no longer assured its place as number one. There there's a chance that other browsers could take that over for a while.

Look like it was gonna be Firefox to do that because it was making steady gains, and then Google Chrome hit the the market and that has managed to do quite well as as well. So you might think, well, what would possess anyone two support a browser when we already have so many on the market. Not necessarily that the browser, the new browser wouldn't be better. It might be better, but sometimes it doesn't matter. You come out with a superior product, but the other product is so

entrenched in the market that it doesn't matter. You could argue, and people have argued that this is the case with MP three players. There are people who say, I'm not necessarily one of them, but there are people who say that the Apple line of iPod products our inferior in

some ways to similar products. Correct And using that argument, you might say, well, wait a minute, this, this other MP three player has more features and has a greater capacity, lower price point, what or whatever features it might have that are different from the iPod, why is it more popular? And really the iPod has just become entrenched in the MP three market. Um, same sort of thing with the web browsers. So what could make Mr andrees and think

that the rock melt was a worthy endeavor? And really, I think the answer comes down to the fact that people are using the web differently than they were fifteen years ago. That's true. You know, back then it was all about you go to a web page, you read the content, and you may not ever go back to that web page ever again because the content would pretty much stay the same, right, right, and you might do a little bit of internet shopping, but there wasn't a

lot in the early days. I mean, it wasn't until the late nineties that started to take off. And then of course you had the Internet bubble and uh and after the bubble burst and a lot of companies, well business that that really took a huge that made a huge dent in in online shopping for quite some time.

So really, the element I think that has changed the web the most in the last few years is social networking, right at least that's that's one of the easy things to point to when people talk about web two point oh. In most cases, what they're talking about is some sort of social media technology that is embedded in a web page, like for example, blogs were what I think a lot of people consider sort of an early web two point

oh technology. So you write your blog post and you give you leave the comments open so that other people can comment on your site, and it starts a dialogue between the reader and the author and between the readers themselves too, and then from there we've gone through other types of uh web two point oh technologies, but that was that's sort of one of those things comments on shopping sites, for instance, and of course the social media

sites including my Space, friend stir, Facebook, Twitter, and all the myriad other sites including you know, things like flicker and YouTube, where the primary purpose is not necessarily to have social networking, but that it's a huge, huge aspect of that. And I think, uh, you're right. I think that is supposed to be the This is the hey, we haven't used your favorite word in awhile, convergence of social media technology and the browser, so that the social

media part is always on, no matter what site you're visiting. Yeah, And that's that's the basic idea of rock Melt, and that that explains why there's this close relationship with Facebook where you have to sign in to Facebook in order to use the rock Melt browser the way it's intended to be used. Um. Now, Chris and I both have access to the rock Melt browser as we record this. It's currently in beta test mode and it's invitation only. Um And and that's just a for for right now.

That that's actually sort of a new development too. It wasn't even open to beta testing, uh participation until probably just a few days before recording this. We had a few days to play with it, but it's enough time to really kind of get a first impression. Now, the way the browsers laid out is kind of interesting as opposed to you know, most browsers have the main window is all the web page, and then you'll have a maybe a bar at the top and possibly one at

the bottom that would allow you to do some navigational features. Right, you have your your web page controls, the browser controls themselves, um, and then an information bar at the bottom where you see your address and if you have plug ins, which is you know, very very popular for Firefox and Chrome especially as well as other browsers too, but primarily, but primarily those they're they've made themselves very open to that. Uh. You know, you'll have those you might see those on

an additional panel or or toolbar, um. But yeah, for the most part, that's you know, it's all part of that. Yeah, the rock melts a little different. Uh. Now when you're looking at the main body of the browser, when you're looking at the actual content. Uh, it's going to look very familiar to anyone who's used Chrome because rock Melt is built on Chromium, which is the open source code that Chrome itself is based upon so you can think of rock Melt and Chrome is sort of cousins. You know,

they're not directly related. It's not that rock Melt is a Chrome built it's just using the same base code that Chrome uses. Right as of right now. Um, according to Seth Rosenblad c net uh, rock Melt, the current data zero point eight point three four point eight three three is built on Chromium six. There you go. Um, you can take that to the bank folks. Of course, probably by the time well, I mean it's in beta, so by the time this goes live, that will probably

be updated from that point. Um, actually it may have been. That's a few days ago from now, so that aren't mean. Beta's tend to move pretty quickly, and sometimes sometimes they're very tiny changes that are not perceptible to users. It's all on the back end and it you know, we don't ever really notice it. Uh. Well, anyway, that's that's

the main portion of your your browser. But unlike other or unlike most browsers, rock Belt also has edges or little panels along the side that allow you to access um uh extra content. Uh. And by extra content, I mean things that you have specifically designated as being interesting to you. So you have your Facebook friends on your left side, all the ones who are currently online, which

allows you to chat with them using Facebook Chat. As a matter of fact, it will show you you get the familiar, well semi familiar if you're used chat programs that will probably be uh comfortable for you. You'll see a dot next to their name. Um, I thought I

had that turned. Mr Plett needs to mute his iPad. Okay, So if you if you look at the left side, you'll see your your Facebook users, and you'll you'll see their photos, you know, the thumbnail photos, and there'll be a green dot if they're online and a clear dot if they are not. At least that's the way I remember. I believe, I believe you are correct, and so you can. You can initiate a Facebook chat directly from your browser. You don't have to be on your Facebook page in

order to do it. And then on the right side are some icons that will include things like Facebook status is as well as direct um interactions on your Facebook page. So let's say that you posted a status update, You'll have one icon that will alert you if people uh respond to that stas update or if or like it or whatever, or if they post your wallpost directly, that'll come up under one icon. Under a second icon, you'll be notified whenever your friends are updating their Facebook pages,

so you have two icons for Facebook. Then you you can also link to your Twitter account if you have one, so you can get Twitter updates that way, and the browser itself will even give you live updates. A little window will pop up with the the update, whether it's a Stats update or a Twitter update, um, those those

will come in in real time. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds this way, and you will have a little icon that will tell you whenever the web page that you've subscribed to has been updated, and you just click on that little icon, it'll pull up the most

recent content. So the the idea here is you can browse one web page and be alert to all the updates on the other web pages you're interested in, and you can keep up to date with them without having to keep popping around to you know, different, you don't you don't have to physically go to each web page to check because you have the little alert system there.

And I'm kind of curious to see how that's gonna play out because in general, websites don't like it when you can find out what information has been updated without actually visiting them, because that can come into some problems with advertising deals and impressions. So it'll be interesting to see if that has any if there's any resistance from website administrators to this new browser. Resistance is futile. Yes,

I heard that somewhere. I heard it as well just now in fact, well, um so, reactions from the tech press have been sort of mixed. Yeah, there's there's some people I think who really really dig it. They but they're using it in a very specific way. They're using it specifically to keep track of all the social networking stuff they do. They are not technically using it as a browser, or at least not not relying it upon

it as their new browser. Almost every review I've read that was positive called it a great a great Facebook browser, not necessarily a great web browser. Um and that's kind of how I use it. I no, I was just gonna say that. It's sort of funny to say that because it's primary purpose is as a web browser. So I think basically the difference being the social media aspect.

I think That's why it comes off that way, is that, um, you know, people are supposed to be thinking of it in those terms, and of course you know, we're being asked to think of it, you know, especially that the journalists are thinking of, well, what's different about this? The the chromium functionality seems to be pretty much the same for me, uh, you know, in my experience as it

has been. But it does give you a little bit more oomph when you're looking at things like, well, do you want to like this thing that you're looking at? You know, sort of. It just makes it more simple to do that without having to look for, you know, the like button. Yeah, you can. You can share web pages directly to your Facebook page. Let's say that you're visiting a site and you're reading, let's say, um, uh, let me get a good website, um, how stuffworks dot com.

Let's say you are visiting how stuff works dot com and you're reading a really cool article like how Asimo works by Jonathan Strickland. So you're reading how Asthma works by Jonathan Strickland on how stuff Works dot com and you're thinking, this is a really neat article. I would like to share this with my friends and within rock Melt, you can do that just by clicking a little share button. It's part of the browser itself. You don't have to

look for a share button on the article. You don't have to copy the u r L and go to your Facebook stas page and paste it manually. That way, it's built into the browser directly, which is kind of a neat feature. You can also do that with things like you can you can tweet things directly that way as well. And it has its own built in u r L shortener. I believe, although I haven't really played with that, I heard that there were some problems with the u r L shorten or at least other people

were experiencing ms. They were testing the links that we're being shortened, and we're having trouble getting to them, especially from browsers that were not rock melt. Um. I have not personally tested that, so I only I've only that's

secondhand knowledge to me. Yeah, and it's beta too, so you should expect there if you if you're trying this out for yourself, if you also haven't an invitation to use rock melt and you've found it to be buggy, I mean, that's really to be expected, but we haven't even reached a release candidate yet, so so what we're using is the earliest usable build from outside of its

own internal testing area. Uh. It's one other thing I thought I would mention before we talk more about about the the our impressions of this UM and I'm sure there's an easy way to get around it. Those edges that we talked about, the left and right edges, Right, they tend to cut off the edge of the web page you're looking at. Yeah, bugs me too. It means that you have to you have to scroll horizontally as

well as vertically. Well, it depends too. I feel compelled to point out that the world seems to be moving toward the UM the wide screen aspect ratio, so I think that's going to matter less in the future than it does for those of us who are you still using some sort of screen with a four to three aspect ratio. Right, that's a good point. Yeah, if I were using a newer computer, then perhaps I wouldn't have this issue. I'm not going to say anymore about that

particular situation. I mean, it's okay that my screen is primitive and that half my keys don't work and I have to avoid words with the letter E in them. That's fine, that's fine, I'm I'm all right with them. My prediction, my my prediction that you're going to get a new computer by the end of the year. I'm running out of time. That happened. Yeah, that's that's looks like that's going to lend in that ex category. Um and used to that if you listen to our recap

show from the beginning of this year. So, um, there's one thing that I found interesting that's not directly about rock melt. Um. I am somebody who likes to try out all kinds of new, uh techie things, which probably surprises very few of our listeners. Um, you know, just to to give him a shot. And the browser wars, especially since they've become free. Um are I think a really neat opportunity to really compare one piece of software

to another. So it's every time a new browser comes out, I'd like to give it a shot if it's free, And I tried one some years ago that actually has a lot of this functionality built in already. UM. I'm sure you, Jonathan have heard about it, but some of our listeners may not have. Yes, I'm gonna guess it's Flock. Yes, indeed, Flock, which actually has been up for Webby Awards and a number of other awards because it's got a lot of

the features already built in. It's got social networking capabilities for uh, Facebook, Twitter, UM, in addition to others including Flicker, UH and YouTube and UM. It actually migrated not too long ago, just a few months ago, from a flock migrated. Yes, the flock migrated from Nice from the Mozilla platform to Chromium. In fact, it is using the same build of Chromium six that that UM, the current version of rock melt is using. And this again, as according to Mr Rosenblatt

Um and UH. The thing that I've seen I've seen a lot of the other tech writers say is that, well, flock has quite a few users, but really it's not even making much of a dent in the market. So why does rock melt feel like it's browser is going

to beat that, you know, limited success of Flock. I've tried flock and I like it a lot, I would say that, Andreason's involvement is probably part of it, because I mean, here you have someone who was behind one of the most successful actually the story of of Netscape Navigator would be an interesting one to cover at some point in tech stuff because you talk, you talk about a web browser that seemed to be the dominant browser and it wasn't ever going to change, and and then

it changed rather dramatically and relatively quickly. Um, the fall of Navigator was pretty impressive. Actually. Uh So, I think Andreson's involvement probably has something to do with it. And and I get the feeling that the Rock Melt folks are really media savvy. They're very very good at getting their message out there, and so a lot of tech companies kind of lack that that ability to interact with

the media in a compelling way. It's because you know, there's a lot of them are are very technically savvy, and they're very good at putting together the product, but they're not as good at selling the product to the media. Um. There are other companies that are phenomenal at selling product to the media, like Apple, which also makes amazing products.

I'm not that wasn't a knock against their technical savvy, but they are very very As the day we're recording this podcast, Apple managed to to to get the media's interest in a big announcement that turned out to be the Beatles coming to iTunes yep. Um, Yeah, it's funny to note, um actually that it wasn't that long ago. Now, I mean this, this is one of Apple's announcements that was pretty quiet and by the terms that they're frequent, uh show stopping pr events that they managed to put on.

Um that they opened Safari up for plugins, and I think that, uh, Apple probably sees the writing on the wall. I mean, they're they're not even third in the browser wars, but I mean they have a reasonable market share, but it's still tiny compared to the big guys, and uh, you know, I think that's one of the reasons they are opening themselves up to allowing plugins is for things like this social networking functionality. Yeah, to kind of head off the impact that browsers like rock Melt and flock

could have. Um. I think the rock Melt and flock approaches are really interesting. It it seems like it's a big risk to me because it seems to be placing the bet in that social networking is the way the web will continue to grow. It'll be the the evolutionary force that pushes the development of the web into the future, um,

which it's quite possibly true. But the problem is that, you know, the future is really hard to predict, as we have discovered every December here at tech Stuff, uh, and that placing your bets like that can come back to haunt you. It may be that two or three years from now, no one would really be as interested in a socially a social networking kind of browser that like rock Melt because it no longer is relevant, right,

So it's a little dangerous in some ways. I would say that the argument of going with a browser that you can you can tweak with plugins might be the better way to go. But on the other hand, going with a browser with this stuff is h is built into the browser means that it's at least in theory, going to work properly. Because with plugins you can get plug ins that end up interfering with one another and

can make a browser unstable. And you you know, so if you've ever had Firefox and you've added a whole bunch of different plugins and Firefox is really unstable, that's one potential reason for that instability. Doesn't necessar certainly mean that that's what's causing it, but it's possible It's also possible that those the plugins could open you up to security vulnerabilities and other problems, especially if it is a UM developer who may or may not know what he

or she is doing very well. Somebody who's new UM may not understand that, or even somebody who's experienced. I mean, anyone can make a mistake. So, I mean, they're there are all kinds of things that that do that. But you know, it's funny that you would you would bring up the big guys comparatively because I read an article in Computer World by Greg Kaiser, who talked to several analysts.

Al hilwa At I d C said just that basically, the big browser companies may very well just go, hey, you know what, We're gonna offer plug ins that do exactly the same thing as Rock Mountain Flock and basically torpedo them before they can really make a dent in the market UM. But Gardner's Ray Veldez suggested that it's possible that Rock Melt is trying to do one of the classic small business small tech business moves. He thinks that it's possible that maybe they're going, hey, Facebook, yeah,

we got this really cool browser. It's really good. If it had your name on it, maybe you want to buy us. Yeah, we look really good. It's possible I could see that happening. Um the it'll I'll be curious to see how it all turns out. There are also other questions that we honestly don't know the answer to yet, Like because you have to sign into Facebook, does rock Melt get any of that data? Right now they're saying that they're not really they have no interest in that.

That's they're not looking at selling your data to advertisers. But you have to wonder you're using Facebook connect to launch this browser, and how much of that information is rock Melt privy to and and and how does that now that that information is actually or that that connectivity is baked in of the browser. Are their security vulnerabilities that we don't know about, or that maybe rock Melt itself hasn't anticipated that could come to haunt people who

who are early adopters of this this web browser. I think I'll probably find out because I have it. Well, here's something that as I was putting this research together for this podcast, I would not have anticipated as an argument. But again, as at the time we're recording it. Just yesterday,

Facebook announced that it was unveiling a new social messaging service. Now, if rock Melt can build this into the browser, uh, you know, with its integration with Facebook, UM, it would make it basically an email program, a chat program, and a social networking program, and then you wouldn't need necessarily a separate mail client or a separate web browser. You'd have it all in one piece of software. It actually looks kind of like refined version of what Google Wave wash.

And it just seems to me that in a way rock Mount may have been ahead of its game, perhaps without even knowing it, just simply by you know, latching onto the the Facebook wagon and following wherever Facebook goes. So that could be just an added argument for that. Now. Mozilla also not too long ago announced F one, which is a set of a plug in that will allow

UM some functionality for UH social media purposes. I read a little bit about it in a PC World article by I'm afraid I'm gonna mispronounce his name kier Thomas k e I r UM. But basically it allows you to share UH links to different websites and UM works with Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail. UM. But you know, it's again another example of the big guys catching on and going ahead and and and baking that in. If I knew you were coming, I want to bake that into

my browser. That was a long way for a bad joke, but I've gone, I've gone further distances for weaker payoffs, so I can't really criticize. But yeah, I mean, it's it's just it's weird to see, um, you know, in the in the in the age of apps taking over for the browser in some instances, um, something that's sort of like a browser app, um, you know, specifically aimed for a subset of web users. So that's, uh, it's kind of a zag if you will, to the zig.

So I'll really be interested to see how rock Melt performs once it comes out of beta and becomes publicly available to everyone. Clearly, all the techy's immediately tried to get an invite. I was very fortunate to get an invitation from uh Mr tom Merritt, who was kind to extend that to me, and then I immediately extended one of my three invites to Mr Palette. So you yeah, so so we that's how we managed to get into that because we were not part of any of the

initial announcements or anything. But I can say that, uh, you know, it's a browser. It goes quickly because it's based on Chromium. UM. I don't like the fact that, because of the way my screen is, I have to scroll horizontally. Although I guess I could in theory tweak it so that the page is a little smaller and fits on my screen, it's just me. Just means that I wouldn't be able to read things as easily as

as my eyes are getting old people. UM. So my initial reaction is that it's an interesting way to keep up with all your social networking stuff. It's also interesting way to keep up with all those sites that you really enjoy and you want to to know when there's new content on those sites. But it's not enough for me to adopt it as my primary browser. My primary browser right now remains Chrome. Yeah, I can say, I mean I could see that a night. I fiddle with

all honestly a lot of different browsers. UM. I've used flock. One of the things I like about flock is that you hide for the most part, you hide a lot of this stuff um that normally would appear on the uh. In this case in rock Melt, where you have that persistent bar on the left, well actually both rails, um. You know, you can hide a lot of that and and and Flock. And I haven't tried the new version of Flock that's based on Chromium. I used the one

that was based on Mozilla, which I liked very much. Um, But I don't, you know, if Facebook is something I don't use as often as some other people do, so I usually check in two or three times during the day and spend a lot less time on it, so you know, I see the value in that. But I do like the fact that the browser wars have heated back up again a lot of times. Or right after Internet Explorer essentially crushed what was then Netscape, people basically said it was over with, and I'm glad to see

that people are putting new technology out there. Of course, Opera UH, with its tiny, tiny market here, still has some innovative features that others pick up on after that and used to their advantage. But I still like Opera an awful lot. I don't use it as my primary browser. UM, but yeah, I think I think it'll be interesting to see where it goes. I don't know that it will ever be number one, but rock Melt certainly has its place if it can, you know, once the bugs get

worked out. Sure, So we're gonna wrap this up. Guys. If you guys have an access to rock Melt, you want to let us know about what your experience was like, you can let us know either on Facebook or Twitter. Are handled, There is text stuff h s W or you can write us an email. That address is tex stuff at how stuff works dot com. Chris and I will talk to you again really soon, Jonathan. Actually, this was just handed to me. It looks like how stuff works dot Com now has an iPhone app. Sweet awesome.

Yeah um, I got to to take a look at this earlier, and guys, this is pretty cool. The iPhone app is sort of a way to integrate all the cool stuff we do at how stuff works dot com. So you guys may have listened to one of our podcasts and we talked about there's this great article on the site, but you're not at your computer, so you

can't really check it. Well, the iPhone app actually lets you browse articles and blog posts, even lets you interact on Facebook and Twitter, and you can listen to podcasts at the same time, and it has all the house stuff works dot Com podcasts on it, not just ours, but you know good ones too, so you can listen to those and look at the articles and and go on Facebook and Twitter and it should work perfectly with

your iPhones and iPod touch it awesome. What's uh? It looks like it's now available on the iTunes store, so that's good to know. How much does it cost? It's free, ah, brought to you by the re invented two thousand twelve Camri. It's ready, are you