NETSCAFE FOUNDERS BACK WITH ROCKMELT BROWSER

After a successful run in the early to mid 1990s, which came to an end a few years later with the arrival of Windows 95 and Internet Explorer 4, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen is reportedly looking to get back into the "BROWSER WARS".

Marc Andreessen is backing a new browser company called RockMelt. Not much is known about RockMelt other than it is being designed by an all-star team (including software engineer Robert John Churchill from the Netscape days) and that it is tied into Facebook through Facebook Connect. Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has a screenshot of the sign-in page and speculates that RockMelt is in fact a Facebook browser. It kind of makes sense since Andreesen is on the board of Facebook, but I suspect it is only half the story.

Mr. Andreessen suggested the new browser would be different, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the Web, which had grown from an array of static Web pages into a network of complex Web sites and applications. “There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch,” Mr. Andreessen said.

This might give an interesting twist to the current browser wars, but do we really need another contender? Now that Firefox has prompted a new wave of competition in the market, things are started to feel a bit crowded with Chrome, Safari, Opera, and of course a renewed Internet Explorer. But Andreessen believes its new browser would be different from the rest, saying that most other browsers had not kept pace with the evolution of the web – pretty much what every other competitor claims about their rivals.

So what would a true social browser look like? Below is my own wish list of features (some of these are available as add-ons or in existing desktop clients, but there is an opportunity to unify them in one seamless experience):

• It would have multiple modes for browsing, search, following social data stream, and launching Web applications
• The home page would be a stream reader which brings together real time streams from across the Web (which Facebook now has with Friendfeed).
• IM, email, and public messages (status updates and Tweets) would be always accessible in the toolbar or a sidebar
• It would support a variety of Web apps which could be launched seamlessly within the browser without going to a Website and logging in.
• One-button access to sharing services of your choice (Flickr, Posterous, Youtube, Wordpress)
• Real-time search and alerts from across the Web (social stream, news, finance sites, sports sites, etc.)
• Support for Google Gears to give the browser offline capabilities as well as local caching and a light database for computing tasks

That’s just off the top of my head. If you were redesigning the browser from scratch today, what would it look like?