When we last looked at the alternatives to the well-known web browsers, we weren’t particularly impressed by any of them. Now there’s a new kid on the block, RockMelt, that’s coming mighty close to replacing Google Chrome as my default web browser.

When I say replacing Google Chrome, that’s a little disingenuous, because RockMelt is built on the same Chromium browser core as Chrome. It’s Google Chrome with knobs on. But for social networking and news-feed fiends, they are very useful knobs indeed.

Social side

RockMelt’s interface differs from Chrome in two immediately obvious ways. Down the left-hand side runs a series of mini mug shots of your Facebook friends (you need to sign-in with a Facebook account before you can use the browser). A little circular light indicates if your friends are online, and you can conduct IM conversations with your Facebook friends from within the browser. It’s convenient if you natter away on Facebook constantly, but I’ve got a day job, and all this feature has really achieved is to provide a pervasive reminder of how old my friends are looking.

The bar down the right-hand side, the so-called App Edge, is a hundred times more useful. Here you can set up feeds for anything from your Twitter or Gmail accounts to your favourite news sites, and get a little iPhone-style numeric reminder of the number of items awaiting your attention.

The presentation of the feeds is immaculate. Embedded links in tweets to photos, videos and audio are displayed and playable from the browser window itself, meaning you never need to leave the Twitter feed. Likewise, you can comment, give the thumbs up and view photos in your Facebook stream, without ever having to visit the site. The only real issue for social networking fiends is that the Twitter app doesn’t have a built-in URL shortener.

The App Edge also acts as an excellent feed reader for news sites. If you want more detail than is on offer from the news feed itself, you simply click on the link and the full story appears in the browser window, beneath the open feed.

Adding new feeds is easier than making an X-Factor contestant cry. The Add Feed button will automatically create a feed from the site you’re currently browsing, or suggest feeds from your most-visited sites.

Search

RockMelt also has a clever way of dealing with search. Unlike Google Chrome, which pummels search into the single address bar, RockMelt has a separate Search box – in a similar fashion to Firefox 4.

Type your search terms into the box, and a pop-up menu appears with the top 10 Google results. Click on any of those results and the page loads in the browser window, while keeping the search pop-up open on the right-hand side of the screen, so if the site you clicked on didn’t deliver the goods, you can move to another search result without having to hit the back button. RockMelt also appears to do some clever pre-caching with the search results, because pages load the instant you click on one of the search terms.

Google is set as the default search engine, but you can change that in the RockMelt settings. What you can’t do, alas, is choose between different search engines without changing the default (unlike the drop-down search engine selector in Firefox 4), which is a little frustrating.

Chrome extensions

What about all those Chrome extensions and apps you’ve grown fond of?  RockMelt officially supports Chrome extensions and apps, although not always successfully. RockMelt throws extensions into that right-hand App Feed, not the top of the browser like Chrome does.

This creates its own problems, most notably that the pop-up extension windows are bigger than they are in Chrome, sometimes resulting in a rather ugly appearance. And because the thumbnails for the extensions are also slightly larger, icons can look a little blurry.

Some extensions refused to work at all, including Create Link, a rather niche app for embedding custom HTML. Chrome Apps – which as I’ve mentioned in the past, are little more than glorified bookmarks anyway – worked fine.

Features

Aside from the odd extension glitch, there are other Chrome features absent from RockMelt. There’s no built-in Flash or PDF reader, meaning both plugins have to be downloaded separately from Adobe. Also missing is Chrome’s built-in audio player which allows you to start listening to podcasts right-away in the browser window without having to download the full audio file first.

On the credit side, however, RockMelt does have a newly released iPhone app that allows you to synchronise your feeds and bookmarks with your mobile (using your Facebook account for authentication). It also allows you to take advantage of one of RockMelt’s other neat features: View Later. Click on the little clock icon in the address bar, and RockMelt saves a link to the site so you can come back to read it when you’ve got more time, or on your iPhone on the way home.

Verdict

So does RockMelt elbow Chrome off my Windows taskbar? Yes and no. Yes, I’d be happy to run RockMelt as my default browser. The social networking tools are magnificent, and as someone who needs to keep a constant eye on breaking news, the feed updates are perfect.

But when I need to do specific tasks, such as editing web pages that benefit from that handy HTML extension, or play a podcast, I’ll still revert to Chrome. The beauty of RockMelt/Chrome being that both browsers fire-up instantly – unlike Internet Explorer or Firefox and their cloggy start-up procedures.

I’ve never considered running different browsers for different applications before. In that sense, at the very least, RockMelt is a game changer.

For years, we’ve been wondering how long it will take Firefox to overtake Internet Explorer. The latest figures suggest that it’s Google Chrome that actually poses the biggest long-term threat to Microsoft.

The TechCrunch blog is today reporting that Chrome has overtaken Firefox as the most used browser to visit its site. In November, 27.8% of the visitors to TechCrunch used Chrome, with 27.7% running Firefox, 20.4% on Safari and Internet Explorer in fourth place with only 15.7%.

We’ve seen a similar trend here on PC Pro, where Chrome has gone from a 9.0% market share in November 2009, to a 19.0% market share last month. It’s still a long way behind Internet Explorer (34.7%) and Firefox (31.5%), but it’s gaining fast.

Nobody could claim the tech-literate readerships of TechCrunch and PC Pro are reflective of the internet public at large, but those figures do reflect the behaviour of the early adopters: the people who will influence the wider public.

And there  are signs the general public is flooding towards Chrome too. The latest monthly figures from Net Applications show that Chrome now commands 9.25% of the worldwide market, up from 8.5% the previous month. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox continue to head south.

If Chrome continues to gobble up market share at its current rate, I think it’s only a matter of time (perhaps within the next 18 months) before it overtakes Firefox as the alternative browser of choice, and then sets its sights on Internet Explorer.

Then the EU’s competition authorities really will have something to think about…

So when its execs – including founder Jon von Tetzchner and “father of CSS” Hakon Wium Lie – shared their vision of the future of the web at a press event in Oslo, it’s safe to bet at least some of their predictions will prove accurate.

Here are a few of the ideas Opera shared about how the web will evolve in years to come.

HTML5 and CSS3

If you’re going to place your bets on what the web will look like in a decade, the best place to start is standards.

Consider this: in 1998, the web was based on HTML4. We’re only now moving onto HTML5. We’d better get it right, then. “This time in history is going to be important from a web perspective,” said Wium Lie. “In 2010 we see the next generation of these standards. Together these specs will change how web pages are made.”

One major area of change is text. Right now, to do anything different with text – give it a drop shadow, use a font other than the ten defaults, wrap it in a rounded border – is complicated. Consequently, web developers use images of words instead, but they can’t be indexed so easily by search engines. “We don’t really want to send images of text over the web, that’s what fax machines did,” Wium Lie said.

We don’t really want to send images of text over the web, that’s what fax machines did

With CSS3 and HTML5, text will get to stay as text and look pretty with only a few simple lines of code. In other words, say goodbye to Verdana, Comic Sans and Arial, and say hello to crazy fonts and rounded borders and shading – although, hopefully not all at once.

Apps will move back to the web

Native apps are big news at the moment, thanks to Apple’s success, but Opera thinks applications will move back online and be browser-based. “We think native apps are a stop-gap solution, and the web is going to provide the final answer,” added Wium Lie.

CEO Lars Boilesen said apps will move back to the browser. “Apps will become web-based,” he said. “All applications are moving away from native applications to web applications. They will be completely web-based so they can run on any operating system out there.”

Moving apps back to the browser will make it easier on developers, he suggested. “Only one thing connects different mobile operating systems and that is the web,” he said.

That immediately raises one question: what happens when there’s no web connection? Wium Lie noted that HTML5 allows storage inside the browser, so users can keep working away until their connection returns.

Death of proprietary tech

“We believe proprietary technologies will die,” said Boilesen. “They are clearly an integrated part of the web, but we believe there will be new technologies that are much easier to use that will replace these, such as HTML5.”

We believe proprietary technologies will die

Of course, by that, he could only mean Adobe’s Flash. Will HTML5 really take out Flash? “In the long run, we see standardised technologies coming in and maybe taking over some of that functionality,” suggested chief development officer Christen Krogh.

However, Wium Lie had a different thought: “Flash could open up. If they have something proprietary and share it, it will work better that way.”

OS will become meaningless

One good thing about the mobile market is “there will never be an OS monopoly,” predicted Boilesen – and indeed, between iOS, Android, and now Windows Phone 7, it’s clear the big players are hoping that doesn’t happen either (at least, not to one of their opponents).

However, they won’t agree with what Boilesen said next: “For most people, the operating system will become irrelevant. People don’t care about the operating system, they care about how they access their applications on the device.”

And that access, he said, will be through the browser. “In ten years, your device will only need a browser,” he said. “In the future we believe you’ll do everything in the browser, including graphics, games and managing your entire existence.”

Then again, a browser company would say that, wouldn’t it?

The rest of the world will arrive

Opera’s execs noted that three-quarters of the world still isn’t online. ”Only 25% of world has web access, so there’s a fantastic opportunity for growth,” said Krogh. “At Opera, we’re concerned about the next billion as well as the last billion, the remaining 75% growth.”

Most won’t connect over smartphones let alone PCs, von Tetzchner  said. That means mobile browsers need to be speedier and handle data better – two areas Opera’s Mini happens to excel in. He pointed out that most developers are creating products for top-end phones. “Just because we’ve shipped a 1Ghz phone, [it doesn’t] mean all phones have that.”

The same holds true for connection speeds, with the next billion coming to the web in areas lacking good infrastructure, he added.

If you build a really ineffective platform you’ll be number one

With that, von Tetzchner noted it’s time web browsers stop being judged by the amount of data they push around, but by the number of users. Most stats about web browsers judge by traffic, but Opera is a bit more clever about that than most, so it takes a hit in the standings, von Tetzchner suggested.

“What I’ve seen them using is data usage [to rank browsers], which is a bit stupid,” he said. “If you build a really ineffective platform you’ll be number one.”

I’ve written in the past about my defection from Firefox to Chrome as my default browser, and was called everything from a “troll” to a “little bitch” for moaning about its increasingly slovenly performance and constant nagging.

Now, it appears even Mozilla’s friends are turning on Firefox. The browser’s co-founder, Blake Ross, was reportedly asked on a web forum whether he felt Firefox could maintain even double-digit market share over the next five years (it currently has around 25% of the worldwide market, according to Net Applications). He replied:

“I’m pretty sceptical. I think the Mozilla Organisation has gradually reverted back to its old ways of being too timid, passive and consensus-driven to release breakthrough products quickly.”

I make him right. It gives me no pleasure to lay into Mozilla – Firefox was my default browser for the best part of the last decade, and Mozilla engineers are among the smartest and nicest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to interview. But Firefox has lost it.

On the rare occasions I fire up the browser these days, it takes 30 seconds or so to get going, and then often needs a reboot once the various extensions have updated themselves. Admittedly, much of that delay is caused by me only opening the browser once a week instead of every day, meaning the updates arrive en masse, but it’s certainly no incentive to go back. Chrome never takes more than 10-15 seconds to get going, and is usually ready for action the moment I press the logo on the taskbar.

Mozilla Firefox also looks like a browser of yesteryear. That stolid grey chrome and old-fashioned menu bar look dated compared to Chrome’s clutter-free, blue interface. And although the performance difference is marginal compared to Internet Explorer, Chrome does have a clear advantage over Firefox on JavaScript-heavy web apps (most notably, of course, Google’s own).

It seems it’s not only me who has swapped Firefox for Chrome, either. The chart below shows the percentage of visitors to PCPro.co.uk using the two browsers. As you can see, Chrome has been rising steadily upwards to almost 14% of our visitors this month, while Firefox’s share has been eroded from a peak of mid-forties last summer to today’s share of 35%.

PC Pro visitors are by no means representative of the internet as a whole, but they are an excellent bellwether of things to come, with our early-adopter audience often reflecting trends that will soon become mainstream.

Unless Mozilla can pull something special out of the hat for Firefox 4 – and we’ve seen nothing revolutionary so far – Blake Ross’ prediction looks somewhat ominous.

Read Tim Danton’s sterling defence of Mozilla Firefox here

Back when the web was young, we all used the Netscape Navigator browser. Netscape which was founded by Marc Andreessen and it is he who is funding Rockmelt. There seems to be some hints that the browser could be linked in some way to Facebook but little more.

Do we really need another web browser? As a web developer the answer is a firm ‘no’. In common use we now have three versions of Internet Explorer, quite a few variants of Firefox, at least three versions of Safari, Chrome and if you are really counting, Opera.

All of these browsers have their strengths and weaknesses. Personally, I use Safari as it is fast but I also use Firefox because with extensions like Firebug and Selenium, it is great for web development. The big problem is all of these browsers are slightly different and these differences make producing websites harder to develop. Of course, we could all just pick the lowest common denominator and produce websites that work in IE6 only. In fairness, Chrome and Safari are reasonable similar as they are both based on WebKit. Also, most Firefox versions are close but there seems to be little similarity between Internet Explorer versions. We don’t know what Rockmelt is based on — it may be Gecko as per Firefox — but we know it will be subtly different.

What we all want is a fast web browser but that is something we don’t seem to have. Apart from tabbed browsing, it is really hard to think of a really useful new feature in a web browser for the last five years. I always wondered if I somehow managed to resurrect a copy of Netscape 1.1 would it be blindingly fast compared with any of the current browsers. Probably not and it would almost certainly be incapable of rendering any web site I pointed it at. Web browsers remain slower than we would all like. Some of this is down to the person who implements the site — there can be many ways of implementing a page in modern HTML/CSS, some of which are fast and some of which are slow. Again there are tools which help developers analyse this — Yslow and PageSpeed — but if the browers were faster we wouldn’t have to worry about such things.

But by jingo it has, at least if today’s news story (Microsoft to offer browser choice with Windows 7) is to be believed. During installation, you’ll get the choice of five (Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari), rendering the EU’s objection of Microsoft exploiting its monopolistic position irrelevant.

“Under our new proposal, among other things, European consumers who buy a new Windows PC with Internet Explorer set as their default browser would be shown a ‘ballot screen’ from which they could, if they wished, easily install competing browsers from the Web,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft General Counsel and Senior Vice President of Microsoft Corp.

So, you’ll still need to go through the hassle of downloading your browser before you can actually use it, but it should also mean that we can avoid this stupidness of having no way to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 (as exclusively revealed by PC Pro many weeks ago).

At the moment the proposal is lighter on detail than Sarah Palin’s plan to get elected President of the USA, and perhaps it’s unfair to expect anything more than broad statements at this stage, but you have to ask how we’ve got to within eight weeks of Windows 7 going on the shelves without this being sorted out.

Until Microsoft updates its code to incorporate this new “choice of browser” proposal – and bear in mind this could take months – anyone in the EU who upgrades their Vista machine to Windows 7 will have to go through the pain and hassle of a full reinstallation, possibly losing all their applications in the process.

So yes, I applaud this latest move by Microsoft. But it’s many months too late.

Don’t get me wrong, Google’s muddy size twelves are all over it. The simplistic interface, the lashings of space, and of course, the brilliant search. What’s been bothering me are the flourishes. The transparency when you drag a tab into a window, the fading task bar, the slide away tabs, the cute animations. Chrome is by far and away the prettiest browser doing the rounds, but pretty is not something I associate with Google -which to my mind has always been the most utilitarian company out there.

Look at Google Apps and their “designed by a bricky” interface. It does the job, but nobody’s ever going to murmur sweet nothings in its ear over a nice white wine. Google Mail suffers the same syndrome. It’s undoubtedly a great laugh down the pub, but if my mates saw me with it I’d be slaughtered.

And suddenly here’s Chrome. It could, of course, just be a reaction to existing uggo browsers, a nice way of differentiating itself from its competitors. But a part of me thinks that while Google publicly denies it’s working to usurp the OS with the browser, this new focus on aesthetics suggests otherwise. Apps don’t particularly have to be beautiful, as long as they work. These days, however, operating systems do. It’s a selling point, and one embraced with gusto by Apple, Microsoft and, lately, Linux.

To my mind, Google is getting ready to quite litterally blue the line between browsers and operating systems. Either that, or its finally hired somebody with taste.  

At first glance, the browser looked extremely impressive. In fact, it’s the only browser I’ve seen that could seriously tempt me away from my snug-fitting default browser, Firefox. However, I must stress that I was only privy to a Google demonstration of the browser before tonight’s 8pm launch, and haven’t actually played with it hands-on myself. For that, you’ll have to wait for PC Pro’s full preview tomorrow.

Here, however, are my early thoughts on what I saw:

Interface

The design of the browser is astonishingly clean. Maximum space is afforded to the web page itself, with ancillary clutter such as toolbars and browser buttons kept to a sparse minimum.

Tabs are handled with real aplomb. Click to open a new tab, and instead of being presented with a blank page, you’re met with a grid of thumbnails of the nine sites you visit most often, as well as a selection of links to bookmarks, recently closed tabs and recent searches.

If you choose to open a selection of those sites simultaneously, in different tabs, you can read each page and simply click on the close tab button, and then swiftly move to the next. The tab bar doesn’t resize until you move the cursor down the page, which is a small, but devilishly clever little touch.

One especially nice touch is the way in which you can drag a tab out of the tab bar to create a separate window – to keep your Gmail screen running distinctly from the rest of your browser tabs, for example. When you’re finished with it, you can simply pop it back in.

Navigation and search

Surprisingly considering Google’s core business, there’s no dedicated search box in the browser. Instead Google combines the address bar (where you type URLs) and the search bar into one, dubbed the Omnibox.

Chrome attempts to auto complete URLs or search terms as you begin typing them into the box. Type London, for example, and London weather might appear as one of the suggested searches, which has the potential to become annoying, but didn’t appear to be too obtrusive in our demonstration.

One novel idea is searching websites straight from the Omnibox. So, for example, you can type Amazon to bring up your previously visited Amazon.co.uk URL, hit the Tab button, and then search for a book using Amazon’s search engine, without actually having to visit the site first. Google said this feature should work with “most websites”.

Performance

Google claims the sluggishness of other browsers was what drove it to build its own, and so it’s no surprise that faster performance is one of the key advantages of Chrome. We obviously can’t make any meaningful judgement of the browser’s speed until we test the code for ourselves, but pages rendered during the demonstration with commendable speed, while Google’s slideshow presentation (from Google Docs, naturally) moved with desktop app slickness.

Google ran a JavaScript benchmark to demonstrate the claimed superiority of its newly-designed V8 JavaScript engine compared to its rivals, Firefox 3.01 and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. It showed a wheel spinning in IE8 at around three revolutions per minute, in Firefox 3.01 at 10rpm and in Chrome at anywhere between 30 and 47rpm. Obviously, such pre-prepared demos have to be taken with a fistful of condiments, but Google is remarkably confident of its web app performance.

Each tab runs as a separate process, so that if one goes belly up, the rest of the browser remains unaffected. A Task Manager showing the memory and CPU clocks allocated to each tab can be used to identify and shut down rogue sites/apps, which is a powerful feature, giving rise to speculation that what Google has created is more akin to a web “operating system” than a browser. Even specific plug-ins can be disabled.

Privacy and history

As you might expect from Google, searching your browser history is especially efficient. The history is very cleanly presented in a day-by-day breakdown, and Google not only searches the URL but the content of the web pages you visited.

If that sounds a little too Big Brotherish, or you want to do a little (ahem) private surfing, you can switch the browser into Incognito mode and surf without the browser retaining any cookies or history. This was a feature Microsoft trumpeted for IE 8 earlier in the week, and one that looks set to quickly become a fixture in every browser.

Summary

Google claims to have spent two years developing Chrome and from my brief demonstration it looks like time well spent. This looks set to give both Microsoft and Mozilla a great deal to think about, and could indeed by a coup de grace for smaller browsers such as Opera and even Safari. We’ll have a more detailed analysis of Chrome tomorrow.

Google’s shock entry into the browser market might be bad news for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but it could be terminal for Mozilla and Firefox.

Google is Mozilla’s sugar daddy. In 2006 (the latest figures we have available), a staggering 85% of Mozilla Corp’s revenue came from the homepage and search deal it has with Google. Firefox is almost entirely dependent on the company that’s just launched what could easily become its biggest rival.

Mozilla might therefore be thanking its lucky stars that just last week Google signed a three-year extension to that Firefox search deal. But why, knowing full well that it was about to launch a competitor, did Google decide to continue propping up Mozilla?

Aside from the fact that cutting ties with Firefox would have instantly wiped hundreds of millions of hits from Google’s search, Mozilla is now Google’s insurance policy. If Chrome fails, Google can maintain its tight-knit relationship with Firefox. If Chrome succeeds, Google can pull the plug on its Mozilla deal.

Which gives Mozilla three years to find a new benefactor. But which other search company would be prepared to pump money into Firefox? Microsoft’s about as likely to bankroll a rival as George Bush is to host an open-top parade through the streets of Baghdad. Yahoo, meanwhile, is now so closely aligned to Google that it’s practically unthinkable that it will step into the breach. Which leaves the minnows such as Ask, who certainly won’t be stumping up the tens of millions Google deposits in the Mozilla vaults every year.

Mozilla either needs to find a new way to make money. Or start cutting its cloth to suit a much tighter budget.

Here’s the breakdown of Firefox browser versions visiting www.pcpro.co.uk this week:

1. Firefox 3.0 – 55.13%
2. Firefox 2.0.0.14 – 39.27%
3. Firefox 2.0.0.11 – 0.96%

And for comparison, here’s the breakdown for Internet Explorer:

1. Internet Explorer 7 – 68.86%
2. Internet Explorer 6 – 30.97%
3. Internet Explorer 8 – 0.09%

So Microsoft still has three out of ten people running an old version of its browser more than 18 months after Internet Explorer 7 launched, while Firefox has converted more than half of its users to the latest version in just over a week.  That should set a few alarm bells ringing in Redmond…

The big question, reader David Wright asks on comments below, is what has Firefox 3 done to its overall market share with PC Pro readers? Here’s the answer:

1. Internet Explorer – 53.74%

2. Firefox – 39.40%

3. Safari – 3.83%

4. Opera – 2.15%

Watch out Microsoft. The Fox is gaining fast.

Check out next month’s PC Pro – on sale 17 July – for our Power User’s Guide to Firefox 3.