Playing with RockMelt

My friend Christophe Poizat sent me invitation to try the new social-media-integrated browser, RockMelt.

I immediately liked the interface. It’s a little more elegant, and seemed faster, at least initially (like Firefox, it seems to slow down the more I use it). I also like the way it displays icons of social media friends, and if I hold the cursor over any of those icons, I got my friend’s latest status update—and also can see if they’re online now.

And I LOVE the way a Google search shows up as a right-hand column of the page I’m on, so I still have that page underneath.

I also really like the ability to set up multiple autofill profiles and quickly select which one to use on a particular form. Given that I’m often switching between the e-address I use for low-priority mail and the one I actually want to be contacted at, that’s really nice.

However, and it’s a BIG however, something about the way it actually processes a form’s submit button is very problematic. I failed to logon to Twitter, Yahoogroups, and Paypal (the last being particularly frustrating  because I was responding to a one-time offer that went away). Also some pages simply don’t load, and they work fine when I copy the URl to Firefox.

In sort, from my point of view, the jury is still out.