Marc Andreessen helped bring the World Wide Web to the masses by developing the Mosaic browser. Now, more than 17 years later, a company he’s backing thinks it’s time to rethink the browsing experience.
RockMelt, a Mountain View startup that Andreessen has invested in and advises, is releasing today a beta version of a new, eponymous Web browser built around some of the latest trends in Web technologies. It integrates social networking to a degree not found in mainstream browsers and saves user data to the “cloud,” allowing users to get the same browsing experience on their work and home computers.
“We’re reinventing the browser for how people use the Web today,” said Eric Vishria, RockMelt’s co-founder and CEO.
Users sign into the browser using their Facebook ID and password. That allows RockMelt to save users’ settings on remote servers in the cloud. But it also allows the browser to incorporate social networking features.
Unlike a standard browser, RockMelt’s includes two columns of buttons on the edges of the main browser page. The buttons on the left are thumbnail pictures of users’ self-selected favorite Facebook friends. By clicking on the pictures, users can see those friends’ latest posts on Facebook and Twitter, post a message on their Facebook profile pages or send them instant or e-mail messages over Facebook. Users also can drag elements from a Web page, such as videos or pictures, over to those thumbnails to instantly share them with friends.
Buttons on the right side of the browser are links to news feeds from Web sites, such as Facebook, Twitter or The New York Times. The buttons alert users to updates by changing color and showing the number of new, unseen posts or stories.
Although other browsers incorporate such news feeds, RockMelt’s is managed by the company’s cloud service. Rather than having the browser pull down news updates from the Web, the cloud service pushes the updates to the browser, which company officials say will make updates arrive faster.
The browser also offers a new spin on search. When users enter a search term, the results come up in a small window to the right of the main browser window. Users can view the search results in the main browser by clicking on the links without losing or having to navigate back to the list of search results.
RockMelt plans to make money via referral fees, not only from sending users to the big search engines, but potentially from other sites as well, including Web stores and online gaming sites, Vishria said.
The company, which has about 30 employees, doesn’t need to dominate the browser market to become profitable. Vishria said it could probably hit profitability with less than 10 million users, which is a drop in the bucket compared with the 2 billion or so users on the Internet worldwide.
RockMelt is launching the browser as a limited beta, meaning that consumers will have to sign up and be approved by the company to download the software.
It will face a rough road. Some of its innovations have been seen elsewhere, but haven’t necessarily caught on. Firefox users can install a Facebook toolbar that allows them to interact with friends and the site more easily. Flock, another upstart Web browser, also has incorporated social networking features.
The browser market is a tough one to crack, noted Ray Valdes, an Internet analyst at Gartner, a market research firm. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still dominates the market, and users have several other well-known and well-developed options, including Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Opera.
“I find it intriguing that anyone would launch a browser in this day and age,” Valdes said. “There’s no shortage of great browsers.”
But Firefox’s success in attracting users shows that Web surfers aren’t necessarily wedded to their browser, RockMelt officials said.
“People will switch for a better product,” Vishria said.
Long as its odds might be, RockMelt has some high-profile investors. In addition to Andreessen, who is now a partner in venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, RockMelt has drawn investments from Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell, VMware founder Diane Greene and Ron Conway, an early backer of Google.
Ironically, given Andreessen’s involvement, RockMelt isn’t based on Firefox, the open-source browser developed by Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that rose from the ashes of Netscape, the legendary browser company that Andreessen founded. Instead, it’s built on Chromium, Google’s open-source browsing software that’s based on WebKit, a rival browsing engine developed by Apple.
Contact Troy Wolverton at 408-920-5021. Follow him on Twitter at Twitter.com/troywolv.
