RockMelt—the long rumored “Facebook browser”—sneak-launched early Sunday evening. And with the caveat that I haven’t laid eyes (or hands) on anything other than screendumps of RockMelt, my assessment is that it’s just that: A Facebook browser. Ordinarily I wouldn’t even be writing anything like this without running the software extensively, but it requires a Facebook login, and I don’t have one. More importantly, I have no intention of ever obtaining one.
RockMelt enjoys an undeniably enviable pedigree: Bill Campbell, Marc Andreessen, Tim Howes, and Eric Vishria for starters. Built on Google’s Chromium technology, RockMelt claims to be built around social networking. In reality, it’s built around Google and Facebook.
According to Michael Calore, writing for Wired, users can “post links, videos and status updates to both Facebook and Twitter….” Support is baked in for multiple Twitter feeds, a Facebook chat client, and an RSS reader. But make no mistake, RockMelt—in its current incarnation—is a Facebook browser. Period. The user logs in to Facebook to customize RockMelt: “Friends” to the left; social networking platforms to the right. Send a message? You’re using Facebook. Start a chat? You’re using Facebook.
Calore quotes Eric Vishria, RockMelt chief executive, as saying “We’re going to remain agnostic and pick the services that the most people want to use.” Really? Agnostic? With Facebook baked in you were never agnostic and never will be.
From what I can tell, RockMelt’s sole pseudo-innovation is prefetch (“pseudo-innovation” because the concept of prefetching instructions or information has been around forever; it’s exactly what it sounds like). When the user initiates a search, RockMelt “starts pre-fetching and rendering each one of those ten search results as soon as they show up (with Flash blocked),” according to Calore.
Bottom line: RockMelt is a tepid update of Flock, which was basically a MySpace browser. So, Flock is to MySpace and Firefox as RockMelt is to Facebook and Chrome. Snore. There’s nothing really interesting to see here, move along.
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