Hands-on with RockMelt, the underwhelming Chrome 6-based Facebook-connected Web browser

The day you've all been dreading has finally come: RockMelt, a Web browser that forces you to log into Facebook, is here. Lee covered its release earlier today, but now I'm going to give you my hands-on impressions Looking through the accompanying gallery is by far the best way to understand what RockMelt is, but read on if you want my opinions.

RockMelt is, for all intents and purposes, Chrome 6 with a couple of attractive sidebars. On the left is the 'Friends Edge', where you can see your online Facebook friends, and on the right is the 'App Edge', where you interact with activity feeds. There's also a 'Share' widget up near the address bar... but that's it. As I said, this is Chrome with some sidebars that could easily be added with extensions.

But as they're not extensions that you can simply add to your current installation of Chrome, you're forced into using RockMelt and its antiquated Chrome 6 underpinnings. You're also forced into logging into Facebook -- which takes ages every time you load up the browser. I guess it's downloading my entire profile every time I connect (incidentally, if you try to browse before RockMelt has finished scraping data from Facebook, the browser crashes and refuses to restart.)

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Filed under: Browsers

Hands-on with RockMelt, the underwhelming Chrome 6-based Facebook-connected Web browser originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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