Tech News Beats

Today while reading about browser wars encountered a new browser which claims to be the social browser – Rockmelt. All new browsers which came out in the market and gained market share has their own forte like Mozilla Firefox for security, the lighter Google Chrome for faster browsing etc. Rockmelt’s forte as it claimed is social connectivity through apps. In terms of look and feel it is very similar to Google Chrome. As both Google Chrome and Rockmelt is based on the open source Chromium project.

Rockmelt browser is available for free download from their website. Facebook was interested in a browser for quite sometime and this has translated into their partnership with Rockmelt. The user interface for Facebook on this browser is amazing. While installing Rockmelt, it ask you to sign into Facebook and allow Rockmelt to access your Facebook account. The Facebook interface will show as follows on the browser.

You can see your friend request, messages and updates from Facebook on the top left hand side. Available friends on the left side bar and apps like Youtube, Twitter, website feeds on the right side bar. Every time you try to open Rockmelt it will ask you to sign into Facebook. So you know who funded it to a great extent if not completely.

It has almost all the other typical features of a browsers along with import bookmarks, background pages etc. If you are an adherent Facebook user then this is a very good and probably you are going to use it. You can check all you Facebook updates without being on Facebook page. This will allow you to browse other websites at the same time. But I have found that page loading is little slow in comparison with Mozilla Firefox. Rockmelt is also available for Mac and iPhone.

Barely the dust of Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 could settle down, they are back with the platform preview # 1 of Internet Explorer (IE) 10. IE 9 was launched on 14th March, 2011 and the platform preview 1 of IE 10 was launched on April 12th, 2011. So you can see the pace with which Microsoft is working on the browser front. Well, if you take a close look at the browser market, the hurry in Microsoft’s strategy is no surprise. During the early days of Windows XP and earlier, the main credible browsers were Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Safari was first released as beta on January 2003 and a Windows version of Safari came as late as June 2007. Opera was first released publicly in 1996 and as of now it is in 11th version. With the recent launch of Google Chrome the browser market became even more competitive. Chrome which was first released as public beta in September 2008 has already a market share of 11%. Internet Explorer still enjoys just over 55% of market share but thats way below than what it used to enjoy once (over 90%).

Recent focus of technology on taking everything online also shaken up Microsoft which was going pretty slow on Internet Explorer after IE 6.0. Google is the undisputed search engine leader. Repeated attempts by Microsoft to challenge Google in the form of MSN search, Windows Live search and recently Bing has failed. Google has already surpassed in the mobile OS arena. Google Android OS is the most popular choice in smartphones. Google also plans to take everything to the cloud (server) through the use of their upcoming operating system Chrome. If this comes true then people dependence on Windows OS will reduce drastically. And if you do not know, please note that Chrome OS is basically a browser.

We know that Google earns major share of its revenue from ad serving service “Adsense” which is facilitated by Google search engine. In another step forward Google launched Chrome browser so that it can collect user preferences and browsing behavior which helps in serving targeted ads. Microsoft also has MSN ads which is nowhere in comparison with Adsense. Recently, Microsoft has done a deal with Yahoo to wherein Yahoo searches will be powered by Bing. So when data collection is very critical to business then browsers become very central to future business plans. If Microsoft wants to maintain a level playing field in the online world and maintain its lead in operating system market share then it has to provide better browsing experience.

So now you see how strong is the threat. Microsoft IE 9 has been received very well. In IE9 they have built the browser from scratch. In IE10 it is just improvement and addition of new features. You can download IE10 for a first look and testing.