Rockmelt - a social networking focused browser

             Image via CrunchBaseRockMelt is a google chrome fork that focuses on social networking and has integrated twitter and facebook, as well as RSS support. It currently is in the beta phase and I was lucky enough to get accepted as a tester.


So far (after about a day using it), I can say that I find the concept pretty solid, so I'd like to share my first impressions.

RockMelt looks fairly similar to the standard google browser, with but there are a few major changes. It has 2 sidebars, so called "edges" on each side of the screen. The left edge displays your friends, either simply sorted by online status, or you can select which ones to show. The right edge houses RSS feeds, as well as apps that monitor your google mail inbox and facebook wall, among others.

Image by gallagher.michaelsean via FlickrThe address bar is your usual chrome omnibar, but they added a second search bar to the right of it, that searches google, as well as your facebook friends and twitter. The cool thing about this bar is that it show
search results listed in a small popup and preloads them into your cache, so that when you click on one, the website open immediately, which is rather neat. Between these two bars is a "share" button that allows you to share websites to your facebook wall quickly.

So far, you can install pretty much all chrome extensions into RockMelt, though not all function properly. Luckily. Crucial extensions such as "ad block" and "autopager" do work for me.

RockMelt promises to enhance your social networking capacities and it definitely delivers. There are still a few things that need to be worked on (and surely will) in terms of bugs and I found that the right edge deals poorly with overflow (in other words: not at all) and it lacks google reader support; but all in all, it seems to become a great browser and I can only encourage everyone to check it out if he gets the chance to do so!