RockMelt – The Social Browser

Overview

RockMelt is a new browser that heavily integrates the social media of our day.  So much so, that you need a Facebook account merely to use the browser.  Now, you may be think as I did when I first heard about RockMelt, “Why integrate it directly into the browser?  I can reach Facebook and Twitter easily enough in my bookmarks.”  I’ve discovered there are key advantages in taking their approach, but they come at a slight cost.  Do the pros outweigh the cons?  Discover below, as you peruse through my in-depth review of this intriguing new browser.

Pros

This is what I love about RockMelt.

Facebook integration

This is arguably the key distinction of RockMelt against other browsers.  When you load up RockMelt on a new computer, it makes you log into Facebook before it even opens.  What this allows is seemless integration through the entire browser, making surfing the web a much more social experience

The Friend Bar

On the left is a “Friend Bar.”  It can show either all your friend, with those online listed first, or show only those marked as favorites.  When you hover over someone’s profile picture, their current status is shown, and when you click on their picture, a chat window opens to allow you to chat with them, send them a message, or mark them as a favorite.

I personally love this feature.  It’s great to know who’s online, and I can chat with anyone I want while doing something else on the web (like writing this post).  It’s nice and out of the way, but easily accessible whenever you need it.

Feeds bar

On the right is a bar of your feeds.  Automatically included is a one-click stop to most recent News Feed and a button to see your Notifications.  These are the two most used features in Facebook (at least for me).  While researching for an article, or reading a blog, I automatically see if there’s something new (via a ticker number on the icon), and can see what my friends’ latest statuses our without ever leaving what I was doing before.

Another great plus about the feeds bar is you can add whatever feeds you want.  An obvious one for Twitter users is a Twitter update, but anything that has an RSS feed can be placed there.  The one downside is there is no Google Reader sync available at this time, but hopefully that’s coming.

Additions to the Top

The RockMelt programmers added two key buttons to the top bar of the Chrome interface: a status updater and a “Share” button.

The former is pretty straight forward: you click on it to update your status.  What’s a nice bonus is you can also tweet from that same button.  Lovely integration across your multiple social platforms.

In Between the address bar and the search bar, is a Share button.  If you are reading an interesting article, just click the button to share it with all your friends.  Again, this works for both Facebook and Twitter, and you can add whatever message you want to the post before you send it.  This is a nice time-saving feature as you don’t have to go into a separate tab for Facebook if you want to post something.  You can even drag a photo up there to share that; it’s not limited to just websites.

Sync across different computers

One of the key features I’ve enjoyed most, but haven’t seen publized much, is RockMelt’s automatic syncing between computers.  I currently have a Mac at home, and I use a Dell Inspiron mini on the go.  RockMelt is installed on both.  I discovered, to my wonderful joy, that when I spent 20 minutes organizing my bookmarks at home, they were automatically there, nice and neat along the top of the browser window, when I opened up the netbook.  As far as I can tell, it also syncs my history and searches.  All the feeds on the right are automatically updated as well.

Now, I know other browsers (such as Firefox) have this feature, as well as some of the others through addons, but you have to jump through hoops to get them.  In RockMelt, thanks to linking itself inseparably to your Facebook log-in, it is all automatic.

Cons

Now to the cons.  There are very few downsides that I have found, but there are some issues worth mentioning:

Invite-only

This isn’t a big deal, as the restriction will be lifted soon, but RockMelt is in an invite-only beta as of the writing of this post.  I personally have 7 invites left I can throw out to those who want one, but no guarantee I’ll have those for long.  You can also ask for an invite on RockMelt’s website, but I waited for over a week to get mine when I asked for it.
Speed
Though it is still my browser-of-choice on both computers, it seems to run a bit slowly on the Inspiron Mini.  With that said, it suffers no lag on the Mac.  Just beware a little bit if your primary computer is a Netbook.

Screen real estate

This is my number one complaint: my Netbook’s screen is already suffering from a small screen complex, and this browser unfortunately makes that space even smaller.  Before I was used to Firefox’s full screen view, which effectively left the screen wide open for just the web.  RockMelt does have a “full-screen” view, but it seems a little gimpy as you can’t even access the address or search bars while in this view.  My suggestion would be to allow the side bars to hide in full-screen mode, and appear when I hover over the side of the screen.

Conclusion

I love this browser.  I have been using RockMelt pretty much solely for the past two weeks, and it has instantly become my favorite way to search the web.  The continuous connection to my social networks and favorite blogs is great.  It is all so seamless, and I don’t think I’ll be running back to Firefox any time soon.