Browser Wars

Frankly, I am happy with Mozilla! But when Chrome started its Beta version I took it up with interest. An interest that's generated by Google products, and interest to see how things could be different. Unfortunately, I was not much impressed by it and its constant crashing made it the least used browser where it definitely had a very stiff competition from the good old Internet Explorer! The only exception to the whole episode worth mentioning was their unique way to explain the technology.

When I heard about RockMelt I was impressed to see that its started by Netscape alumni and their idea was social networking (the buzzword again!). So I eagerly signed up on their facebook page. I must say I'm impressed that I did receive the invite within a week.

So wats the hype all about? Eh! well I installed RockMelt thinking that its a solution to all my problems. The problems that I face when people contact me through the various online options. Most people via email, some still leave me offline messages on yahoo (yah!), some through scraps on orkut and some through the wall and messages in Facebook. So I somehow imagined that the misery of multiplicity will be all resolved with one browser. Therefore, you must understand that I double clicked the RockMelt icon on my desktop for miracle's to happen much like the anticipation that Obama was going to 'change' the world! This action lead leads me to a login screen for facebook in which I had the option to cancel i.e. not log into FB. So I canceled to see how things would go and all I got was a Google chrome! Absolutely exactly Google chrome! Hmmmm.....

Now I went back and re-started RockMelt and this time logging into my facebook account. This leads to multiple things happening. First on the LHS the side bar called the 'friends edge' comes up with all my contacts on facebook. It does sort by people online, idle and offline but yes it brings up 'all' the friends. There is an option to mark some as favorites and only display those favorites. Some thing to think of would be see the settings of 'groups' that I have setup on FB. If a user created them painfully then I think they would appreciate that those groups marked as 'offline' to some members are honored.

On the RHS is the 'app edge' tab which displays RSS feed from facebook and any other website that the user wants to set up. Twitter is an option and its easy to share and post links on facebook, twitter etc without having to use websites like tinyurl etc.

But how was this ground breaking or innovative? Can I not just get some chrome extensions and get the same thing in Google chrome or even Firefox? 

Also, why is FB the only connection? I would rather have connections also to email clients like Google where I can access my friends on Google talk and have a live feed of my Gmail. Finally, I set up various websites on my Google reader so it would be great to have that on the 'app edge' instead of me adding the websites manually. Also there will be a lot to add here so wouldn't it be better if they just used the reader that I've already created?

Anyway all these are things for the future and RockMelt only released its Beta version. For now I've switched back to good old Firefox but I still have hope that 'change' will come.