Last week, we reported the launch of RockMelt – the new socially focused web browser.
This week, we have been lucky enough to test RockMelt, and first impressions have been good.
On the face of it, RockMelt does exactly what it says on the tin. It looks slick, it’s sharp and integrates brilliantly with social media profiles.
Displayed in a vertical bar on the left of the window is a list of your Facebook friends, these can be sorted alphabetically, by favourites or by online/offline status. Clicking on their tab will open a window where you can view their recent activity, initiate & respond to live chat or post to their wall.
We all have Facebook friends we’d rather ignore and a handful we really care about – this is a great way of separating the two.
On the right of the window is the ‘feeds’ bar. This is where you can view all of your feeds, including Twitter streams for multiple accounts, Facebook news feed and news from all of your favourite websites and blogs.
Clicking on a tab opens the feed in a neat window, as shown here;
From here you can reply to tweets, like/comment on Facebook posts and easily share news stories via Twitter, Facebook or email. Like so;
The feeds bar is also where you can view any Google Chrome ‘Extensions‘, such as social bookmarking applications, news and weather forecasts, dictionaries etc.
RockMelt’s Google search bar is pretty intuitive too. Google search results are displayed in a pop out window, so you don’t have to navigate away from your current page to conduct a search.
A nice feature of the search results window is the ability to scroll down the results list and add the pages as tabs without actually opening them. So if there’s 3 or 4 results you want to compare (which there often is) you can click the + button and open the pages as tabs when you’re ready.
There are no doubt lots of other features we haven’t included here, but on first impressions, we’re impressed with RockMelt and think it’s a fantastic web browser for the social media addict.
What makes RockMelt so good is the way you’re able handle your social networking without ever having to leave the page you’re on.
Nice work RockMelt, big thumbs up from us.
