14 DAY TRIAL // Just when you thought the browser wars couldn't get any bigger, RockMelt launches a brand new one, with the same name, which aims to re-invent the way people use browsers.
The premise is to build social features straight into the browser to make it easier for people to stay connected, share content and keep up with the latest news from their friends or favorite websites. RockMelt has been in the works for the past couple of years.
There are a couple of caveats though. It's not exactly a 'new' browser since it's based on Chromium, the open source project on which Google Chrome is based as well. Unfortunately, it's built on Chromium 6, a rather old version by Chrome standards.
The idea behind it, to build social features into the browser, is not exactly revolutionary or new, either. Flock has been doing it since 2005 and the latest version of the social browser is also based on Chromium. Still, RockMelt does quite a few things right and it may find an audience for itself, just like Flock has.
"RockMelt does more than just navigate Web pages. It makes it easy for you to do the things you do every single day on the Web: share and keep up with your friends, stay up-to-date on news and information, and search," an announcement on the RockMelt blog reads.
"Your friends are important to you, so we built them in. Now you’re able to chat, share that piano-playing-cat video everyone’s going to love, or just see what your friends are up to, regardless of what site you’re on," the blog post explains.
"Your favorite sites are important to you, so we built them in too. Now you can access them from anywhere, without leaving the page you’re on," it continues.
Finally, RockMelt enables you to easily share links to either Facebook or Twitter, or simply post updates to the two sites. These three features are central to RockMelt.
The browser is now available for a closed beta and you can sign up for an invite on the homepage. Each user that gets in will also get three invites to share with their friends.