4 ms·

I'm a little disappointed. A truly social browser should introduce something social that is intrinsic to the browser itself, not just integrate with existing so

by seldo 16y ago

I'm a little disappointed. A truly social browser should introduce something social that is intrinsic to the browser itself, not just integrate with existing social sites. A browser should be a basic tool that works equally well for everyone. This browser has Facebook and Twitter built in -- fine for the US/UK market, but what about Europe, South America, and all over Asia, where different networks hold sway? Even if you did try to build integration for all these networks, you would forever be playing catch-up, trying to write a single application with all the features provided by 50 other application development teams. I don't think it makes sense. What if your browser became the new unit of social networking -- like a diaspora node? That would be truly new, and truly universal, at least in potential. All that said, this still looks interesting to me -- I'm definitely part of the target demographic. I might even end up using it regularly. I was just hoping for something a little more fundamental.

jarin 16y ago
"This browser has Facebook and Twitter built in -- fine for the US/UK market, but what about Europe, South America, and all over Asia, where different networks hold sway?" Gotta start somewhere, I imagine they'll be adding more social networks later but it's probably easier to start with the social networks that the developers actually use.
- seldo 16y ago
  Hence my follow-up statement about the impracticality of playing catch-up with every single social network simultaneously. Just keeping on top of changes to Facebook's APIs takes up way more of my startup's time than I'd like.
seldo 16y ago
Replying to myself (I know, it sends you blind) now that I have my hands on the beta: This is Chrome. It looks almost identical apart from a VERY distracting list of of your friends' Facebook profile pics down the left hand side, and equally distracting "unread" counts from your Facebook and Twitter feeds on the right. The oddest thing is that this browser seems to require that you log in to Facebook to start it -- at least, I didn't see a cancel button. The next time Facebook has an outage that's going to be really interesting (also, I can imagine people who work at Facebook QA will confuse the hell out of it). The bookmarks bar is disabled by default. Instead, your bookmarks are integrated into the "about:blank" page, which is an interesting idea. However, I am a heavy user of bookmarklets (delicious/tumblr/awe.sm), which need to be in a real bookmark bar to be able to work, so I needed to enable the bookmarks bar, a setting which is a little buried. The Twitter client is activated by hitting the "unread tweets" button on the right hand side. The client is full-featured if a little rough-edged right now -- but if I'm in a browser already, why wouldn't I just have a tab with Twitter's excellent web client open? Likewise the Facebook client. It's maybe saving me one click, but if I have my Facebook/Twitter tabs closed it's because I'm trying to get some work done, so the unread counts don't help. There are some interesting potential features in here, though. The right-hand side allows you to add feeds for other websites, which is a potentially powerful idea. The integrated sharing tools are extremely slick -- maybe if they provided a way for websites to automatically integrate their own sharing tools I wouldn't miss the bookmarks bar so much. I'll give it a few more hours, but my initial impressions are mixed at best.
- jeffreymcmanus 16y ago
  Sounds similar to the way that Google Chrome OS makes you log into Google to begin. I really hope that mandatory federated authentication doesn't become the norm for everything.
radicaldreamer 16y ago
Ugh, I should've searched for this before I wrote it up, but see here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1881875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1881875 and an excerpt, which makes my main point, that Rockmelt is in a great position to be bought– by Facebook: "Additionally, the Chrome Web Apps store is unlikely to support Safari or Firefox, which makes the fact that almost all of these browsers (including the latest version of Flock) are based on webkit a moot point. Standards support will be the minimum requirement to use a web app, but the real value will be in the specific technologies that these different browsers adopt and the rate at which they adopt them, as well as the way apps get incorporated into a user's browser. The 2nd browser wars have begun. Apple understands this, which is why it maintains a Windows port of Safari, has a Safari Dev Center, and is building a huge server farm in North Carolina. I fully expect to see an Apple backed cloud apps platform, running on a Safari for an end user, next year." because it's about browser enhanced apps and the browser web app stores.

by seldo 16y ago

jarin 16y ago

"This browser has Facebook and Twitter built in -- fine for the US/UK market, but what about Europe, South America, and all over Asia, where different networks hold sway?" Gotta start somewhere, I imagine they'll be adding more social networks later but it's probably easier to start with the social networks that the developers actually use.

seldo 16y ago
Hence my follow-up statement about the impracticality of playing catch-up with every single social network simultaneously. Just keeping on top of changes to Facebook's APIs takes up way more of my startup's time than I'd like.

seldo 16y ago

Replying to myself (I know, it sends you blind) now that I have my hands on the beta: This is Chrome. It looks almost identical apart from a VERY distracting list of of your friends' Facebook profile pics down the left hand side, and equally distracting "unread" counts from your Facebook and Twitter feeds on the right. The oddest thing is that this browser seems to require that you log in to Facebook to start it -- at least, I didn't see a cancel button. The next time Facebook has an outage that's going to be really interesting (also, I can imagine people who work at Facebook QA will confuse the hell out of it). The bookmarks bar is disabled by default. Instead, your bookmarks are integrated into the "about:blank" page, which is an interesting idea. However, I am a heavy user of bookmarklets (delicious/tumblr/awe.sm), which need to be in a real bookmark bar to be able to work, so I needed to enable the bookmarks bar, a setting which is a little buried. The Twitter client is activated by hitting the "unread tweets" button on the right hand side. The client is full-featured if a little rough-edged right now -- but if I'm in a browser already, why wouldn't I just have a tab with Twitter's excellent web client open? Likewise the Facebook client. It's maybe saving me one click, but if I have my Facebook/Twitter tabs closed it's because I'm trying to get some work done, so the unread counts don't help. There are some interesting potential features in here, though. The right-hand side allows you to add feeds for other websites, which is a potentially powerful idea. The integrated sharing tools are extremely slick -- maybe if they provided a way for websites to automatically integrate their own sharing tools I wouldn't miss the bookmarks bar so much. I'll give it a few more hours, but my initial impressions are mixed at best.

jeffreymcmanus 16y ago
Sounds similar to the way that Google Chrome OS makes you log into Google to begin. I really hope that mandatory federated authentication doesn't become the norm for everything.

radicaldreamer 16y ago

Ugh, I should've searched for this before I wrote it up, but see here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1881875 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1881875 and an excerpt, which makes my main point, that Rockmelt is in a great position to be bought– by Facebook: "Additionally, the Chrome Web Apps store is unlikely to support Safari or Firefox, which makes the fact that almost all of these browsers (including the latest version of Flock) are based on webkit a moot point. Standards support will be the minimum requirement to use a web app, but the real value will be in the specific technologies that these different browsers adopt and the rate at which they adopt them, as well as the way apps get incorporated into a user's browser. The 2nd browser wars have begun. Apple understands this, which is why it maintains a Windows port of Safari, has a Safari Dev Center, and is building a huge server farm in North Carolina. I fully expect to see an Apple backed cloud apps platform, running on a Safari for an end user, next year." because it's about browser enhanced apps and the browser web app stores.