Home All PostsRockmelt: My Thoughts and Review
Mar
10

Rockmelt: My Thoughts and Review

Author // Rebekah
Posted in // All Posts, Reviews

Rockmelt – the new social web browser has been in private beta since November.  Private that is, until tonight, when they announced the browser is now available in open beta.  Woohoo!  Eager to get my hands on it, I immediately ran over to their site and downloaded it.  You can download it here.

While it is downloading, I will share some additional information about the new browser.  Rockmelt was developed by Marc Andressen who also developed Netscape.   The browser is built on Google Chrome and is very Facebook – centric.  If you are not a big Facebok fan, you most probably definitely won’t like Rockmelt as its social elements are powered by a Facebook app.  It also has nifty Twitter integration and cool RSS feed features.

Okay – it is done downloading – let me walk you through my first experience with Rockmelt:

Disclaimer:  I was randomly screenshotting everything during this process.  If you are in my screenshots and don’t want to be – let me know :)

Upon installation, the first screen was pretty simple, login to Facebook:

Rockmelt Step1

 

After logging in, you get a screen that looks like the one below, and you are prompted to give Rockmelt permission to do a bunch of really awesome things on your behalf:

 

Rockmelt Step 2

 

I excitedly clicked yes and…drat

 

 

Oh well…I decided if it doesn’t work once click it again…that usually helps, and voila!

I don’t feel like importing right now though, so I’m just going to “skip import”.

The next screen was full of win…and the URL even seems to agree with me…

 

Rockmelt Browser

 

It’s pretty nifty…you roll over those squares, and cool text reminds you what you can do….just in case you didn’t understand from the big boxes…

So all the little pictures on the side are your Facebook friends, and if you mouse over their image it will give you updates.  Pretty cool, amirite?:

 

Rockmelt FB Update

 

You can even sort by favorites, online or offline.

Over on the other side of the browser, are more cool features like a Facebook live feed:

 

 

There is also a cool Twitter feature.  After logging in, you see your timeline.  What I really like, is that it shows tweeted images within the timeline.  No clicking on links.

 

It also shows you new alerts that pop-up in the lower left hand corner of your screen, letting you know that a new tweet has occurred.

 

I can see how this might become annoying after awhile though…so I may look into disabling that feature.

On the right hand side there is also an area for apps and feeds

 

 

It automatically comes with a YouTube app and no feeds setup.  I decided to go ahead and add Mashable.   It was simple enough, it automatically added the feed to the bottom of the window, and clicking on it brought up the feed:

 

 

All this time, I’ve been getting lost in the cool features of the browser and haven’t even used it as a browser yet.  I decided I better fix this so immediately, so went over to my trusty search engine, Ask.com.  Hah..I kid.

I decided I wanted to search for boxes of cute kittens and see what would happen.  Normal Google-like results, so far so good.

While I was on the page discussing cute kittens in boxes, I wondered what if I wanted to look at cute puppies in boxes.  So I used the Google search bar and….kick ass I didn’t have to leave the page to get new results!

 

 

What I thought was really cool, was when I clicked on one of the results, the search page didn’t go away, so I could instantly click on another result if I did not like where I ended up.

All in all – I am very pleased with the new browser and will most likely continue to use it :)  Though I have this weird paranoid fear that since I have to log in to facebook to use the browser…Facebook will collect data on everything I search for….hmmm.  Maybe time to go read some of the privacy info and terms of use.

Overall thoughts:

It seamlessly integrates Facebook, Twitter, and RSS into one whole browsing experience.  I like that because now maybe my boyfriend won’t constantly shake his head and sigh when he sees that I have 50 browser tabs open *blinks innocently*

It’s fast.  I was afraid that with all the add-ons it provides that it may be pretty clunky and awkward…much like the past browser, Flock that promised a cool marriage of social media and browsing.

It looks spiffy.  It pretty much has Chrome’s sleekness and compartmentalizes the additional features very well so it isn’t information overload.  They are there at the ready should you need them, and are quick to access – but all the additional features are great at staying out of the way when you just want to search.

 

Have you used Rockmelt yet?  What are your thoughts on the browser?

 

Another review by Terry at Search News Central (when it was still private Beta)

 

 

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  • http://www.angiescopywriting.com/ Angie Haggstrom

    Just a few quick thoughts:

    I switched to Rockmelt and now use it for all my Web wandering. The only exception are moments when I need big SEO/dev addons. For that, you just can’t beat FireFox.

    With Rockmelt, sharing content on any of my social networks is a breeze, particularly now that I’ve added in the Delicious, Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon extensions. They all show up on the right sidebar (All of the extensions available in Chrome work in Rockmelt to my knowledge), so I just give the right one a quick click and I can move on to something else.

    The only thing I really hated were the Twitter notifications. They were such a pain in the royal you-know-what, they were the first things to go. I also removed Twitter from the sidebar, but I use Tweetdeck, so it was really just a redundant feature. Other than that, it just has the typical Chrome pitfalls.

  • http://dancruzinc.com Dan Cruz

    I like Rockmelt. It’s a good social browser but it’s a little too much “social” for me when I’m trying to get work done. I was thinking the other day if they could find a way to integrate Skype that would be really nice.

    Overall though the integration of rss feeds, Twitter and Facebook are top notch and as you say it’s still pretty fast for a browser running all this stuff.

  • http://www.whole-seo.com Rebekah

    Thanks for stopping by Angie, and for your suggestions about new extensions to try with it – excited to check those out :) Yeah, I removed the twitter updates pretty quickly too – after about 20 minutes it became quickly annoying

  • http://www.whole-seo.com Rebekah

    Integrating it with Skype would be an awesome feature – you should suggest that! I agree – way too much for work though, and like Angie mentioned – I need my Firefox and extensions when doing SEO work.

  • http://joshuatitsworth.com joshuatitsworth

    Rockmelt has become my primary browser. I’ve been able to unsubscribe from getting email updates from blogs by getting the updates via Rockmelt. Good review Rebekah :)

  • http://twitter.com/jhatchdj jhatchdj

    I downloaded and installed Rockmelt on the strength of your review alone and all I can say is…WOW! I am in love! A good portion of my daily work routine revolves around social media. The integration of the platforms is effortless. The tweaks to layout from a traditional Chrome set-up make flow from one network to another virtually seamless. For someone who isn’t spending a tremendous amount of time engaged in social this might indeed feel like overload but to me it’s the answer to a question I didn’t even know I wanted to ask! (Someone make sure GaryVee sees this!)

    I’d like to see the aforementioned Skype integration and the option to assign the friend edge to my choice of chat (GTalk, Messenger, AOL, Skype) contacts and the ability to switch between them. Maybe even to stack them in vertical sliders, not sure.

    I too felt the urge to hide the pop up notifications but held off and I am glad I did. it took sometime for me to realize that a quick glance with peripheral vision to see who had updated gave me all the information required to decide if I needed to read that now or if it could wait until I was free from my current task. The integration of a dedicated bookmark bar should make any Firefox power bookmarker, who doesn’t like shortcut keys and thus never warmed to Chrome, jump with joy at it’s instant availability and I was happy to see my (long forgotten) Firefox bookmarks like I am to see old friends.

    Posting is a snap with the common share button and the Right hand app edge allows single click access to many more applications than I am used to with Chrome! Yay!

    On the downside I was disappointed that while I was able to import Firefox bookmarks, et al with a single click I could not do the same with my Chrome (Ironic?) But that was a minor inconvenience.

    This is a social browsing WIN! I look forward to what I am certain will be some tremendously creative enhancements over the coming months from the Rockmelt team!

    Thanks for pointing the way!

  • http://www.whole-seo.com Rebekah

    Thanks for the comment! I appreciate your additional thoughts and the detail you provided regarding your experience. Very helpful info :) Glad to see you liked it and that my post helped ya. Hopefully Rockmelt will eventually integrate Skype and other chat features to the browser – would never have to close it!

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