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.

It’s much easier to use than many of its rivals, which are feature-packed but often fiddly. Open a page in Miren and it’ll default to its full-screen view – which automatically hides Android’s status bar, too – so you can take advantage of every one of your device’s precious pixels.

Navigation options are both useful and unobtrusive, hidden in the corners of the screen and fading from view if they’re not in use. The right-hand corner houses a button to open Miren’s address bar as well as a handy loading dial, and the bottom-left corner provides a back button. The top of the screen provides links to your tabs alongside a small symbol to open a new page.

Desktop-style features are present elsewhere to make life easier. Chrome users will be familiar with the eight thumbnail images of your favourite sites that appear on boot, and they’re present here, too, alongside links to your bookmarks, history and downloads. Those eight thumbnails can also be customised with links to either a selection of bookmarks or simply the sites you visit most.

Delve into Miren’s intuitive interface and more options become available. A small star beside the address bar lets you easily bookmark a page, and the address bar will bring up likely URLs and search suggestions once you’ve started typing – an invaluable feature that’ll be familiar to any Chrome or Firexox users.

The settings menu is divided into basic and advanced modes, with the former providing simple text side, image loading and cache-clearing options and the latter allowing you to delve into much more detail.

Flash can be disabled, for instance, if you’d prefer the full iPhone browsing experience, and a whole range of page zooming, pop-up blocking and encoding settings can be tweaked. Privacy and security options include clearing your cache, history, cookies and form data, and your passwords can be remembered or cleared with the click of a button.

Miren has options beyond those of other Android browsers, too. Your bookmarks and data can be automatically backed up to your phone and imported from your SD card, and the full-screen mode’s floating buttons can be deactivated or set to automatically fade from view if you’re not using them. There’s even a neat option to pause all downloads if you’re not longer using Wi-Fi, to ensure that you don’t incur high data charges. The only thing we’re missing, at least on the surface, is the option to enable desktop rather than mobile versions of sites.

It has almost all the options you’d want, packed into one of the best interfaces we’ve seen of any browser on the Android platform. It’s free, available right now and is our Android App of the Week – so what are you waiting for?

Want more great Android apps? Check out our previous Android Apps of the Week or read our 36 Best Android Apps feature

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…

One of my very first gigs when I started at PC Pro in 2007 was to interview Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe. He was an affable chap, full of engaging answers to questions he’d no doubt heard a hundred times before. The interview practically wrote itself – though for the sake of appearances I held the pen.

Safari for Windows had just been released and I asked Tristan what he thought of it. “I want Safari to have a significant market share. We want choice, we want innovation, as a company that’s what we stand for,” he told me.

I’ll be honest, at that moment Tristan was the software world’s Tom Jones and my knickers were mid-flight. Three years later and things are a little different. These days, standing for choice and innovation in the browser market is a bit like saying you stand for air and the colour blue. We have the browser ballot – Opera’s work, but Mozilla celebrated loudest – bookmark syncing across multiple machines, private browsing, hardware acceleration. The list goes on.

Standing for choice and innovation in the browser market is a bit like saying you stand for air and the colour blue

Internet Explorer is learning how to play nice with others, Safari gets prettier every iteration, Opera’s on feature steroids and Chrome goes whoosh. Do we still need Mozilla keeping everybody else honest? If not, then what is it that Firefox still offers? What is the outstanding feature? Add-ons are nice – I don’t use any because Chrome comes with all the ones I need preinstalled – but selling your browser on them, as Mozilla seems to be, is riskier than inviting Wayne Rooney to your nan’s birthday party.

Like the catalyst in a science experiment, I’m beginning to wonder if Firefox’s greatest contribution to browsers is not its continued existence, but that it existed at all. Put another way: Mozilla has won all its battles, is it time the company picked a new war?

My lord, if looks could kill I’d be stabbed, shot and dropped off a bridge by now. But bear with me, ferocious internet creature filled with malice and wrath. I’m not suggesting Mozilla give up on Firefox, or that the company’s rubbish at creating browsers. It’s not. However, given the resources available to rivals, and their renewed impetus, Mozilla’s beginning to look like a pantomime horse with a 100,000 people inside being asked to race in the Grand National.

Roaming troublemaker

I think Mozilla has a lot more to offer as a kind of roaming software troublemaker. The company has already proven itself brilliant at pulling a community together, offering it direction and spurring innovation in a lifeless market. Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn’t it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?

Now that browsers are healthy, wouldn’t it be brilliant if Mozilla started a ruck elsewhere?

And in the finest traditions of “did you hear what that bloke just said about your mum” I’d like to suggest that it crash Microsoft’s cushy Office party. As it stands, Office 2010 and Office 2007 are brilliant, and all the rest are rubbish. I’m sure the community behind OpenOffice.org work very hard, but pretending the last seven years never happened is no way to make an office suite. Similarly, and I’m looking at you Google, pretending hard disks don’t exist isn’t exactly healthy, either.

In fact I’d rather carve words into my own flesh than ever use either again – a point rammed home every time to use Ubuntu for an extended period. (Just imagine how much more attractive Ubuntu 10.10 would be with a decent office suite pre-installed.)

This is a market that desperately needs somebody to be brave. Look at Scrivener on the Mac, an utterly brilliant piece of software chock full of ideas that deserve a bigger audience. I’ve written before about the implementation of tabbed documents in a word processor, and that’s only the beginning. There’s so many things that could be better.

I can feel the rope being slipped around my neck, but before you kick away the stool, give yourself over to wistfulness for just a moment. Imagine if Mozilla decided tomorrow to build an office suite. Imagine all those ideas. Imagine how brilliant that could be. Just imagine. Now imagine Firefox 4. Honestly, which one of those are you most excited by?

Mozilla claims Apple’s App Store guidelines prevent it from bringing a full version of Firefox to the iPhone, but Firefox Home is the next best thing.

It sucks up all the Firefox bookmarks and web history stored on your desktop computer and makes them accessible from the phone’s default browser. Better still, it knows what tabs you have open on your desktop browser and makes them available on the iPhone, meaning you can continue browsing where you left off if you suddenly have to rush out of the office, for example.

The iPhone app also includes a search facility, so you can tap in the name of that site you visited last week without having to remember its URL.

Home is an extension of the Firefox Sync tool that was recently introduced into the browser, synchronising bookmarks, history and passwords across different PCs. The autofill passwords don’t seem to have made it to the iPhone app, however.

Home users will need to install the Firefox Sync Add-on and set up an account on their PC first. Registration requires nothing more than a username, password, email address and a secret code used to grant access to your data, with is encrypted and stored on Mozilla’s servers.

The synchronisation worked smoothly in my brief tests (the app was only released earlier today), although we did have to manually refresh the data (using the settings menu) once or twice to get the latest tabs left open on our desktop PC.

Click here to read our 73 best iPhone apps feature

It takes 30 seconds to fire up the browser, Barry says. Well perhaps it does, but it’s still much faster than Internet Explorer, and in general my homepages – pcpro.co.uk and google.co.uk – are ready and waiting for me within ten seconds.

Of course there are irritations – every piece of software I’ve ever used has been irritating – but if Barry’s worried about the grey finish then add a theme. And maybe get a life while you’re at it. (Only kidding Barry, honest!)

And let’s concentrate on the plus points. While Google has a few Add-ins, it’s absolutely nothing compared to the universe of extras available for Firefox. Plus, Mozilla is a company that actually cares about its users’ privacy; Google rather less so.

So why is Google Chrome closing the gap in terms of market share? In part because it is a good product, in that it’s so damn fast, but also because Google is spending cash on promoting it.

Download Skype and you have to untick two boxes or Chrome will both be downloaded and become your default browser. Likewise, visit the Google homepage over the course of a week and at some point you’ll see a message suggesting you download Chrome. Or type “web browser” into Google itself and guess what comes top of the sponsored links?

Viewed in this context, shouldn’t Chrome be doing just a little better than 14% market share?

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

From the irritating freeze that seems to temporarily paralyse the address bar about 30 seconds after it has first booted, to the mystery disappearance of the close button when you’ve got nine or more tabs open, to the clumsy implementation of the new Private Browsing mode, to the way the browser refuses to reboot for about 30 seconds after it (increasingly frequently) crashes… Firefox is heading for a fall.

Fortunately for Firefox, Chrome still hasn’t got the one thing that keeps me rooted to the Mozilla browser for the time being: extensions. GMail Manager, Scrapbook, XMarks and TwitterFox are all that stand between me and a seedy tryst with Google Chrome.

However, it’s those very same extensions that are partially to blame for my number one Firefox frustration: the constant nagging. Barely a morning passes when I don’t boot Firefox to find that one or more of my extensions requires an update – not to mention the browser itself. Ignoring them simply delays the pain for another day; installing them normally means a wait of at least 30-60 seconds whilst the browser sorts itself out. The end result is an (arguably) needless delay to my working day.

Now Mozilla plans to nag me even more. The organisation has announced that it plans to start reminding users to upgrade outdated plugins. It’s starting with Adobe Flash Player (another piece of software that would come dangerously close to my Room 101 shortlist), but plans to move on to other third-party plugins by the time Firefox 3.6 arrives. Terrific. Pretty soon, I’ll have to boot Firefox before I get in the shower every morning, just so that’s it’s ready to use by the time I want to sit down and start working.

I’m not blind to the benefits of keeping the browser and its various add-ons updated, not least for security reasons. Indeed, Mozilla even seems to be suggesting that these pesky outdated plugins are partly responsible for the browser crashes. But unless Mozilla finds a way to make these updates less intrusive, I’m going to be off to browser pastures new. And I might just nag you to join me.

In May, the company decided to have one last attempt at persuading the people on Firefox 2 to move up to Firefox 3, by hitting users of the old version with a pop-up that prompted them to upgrade. Those who declined were invited to fill out a questionnaire, asking them to reveal why they didn’t want the latest software.

The number one reason for not upgrading was the new location bar, and the fact that it delved into people’s bookmark collections to suggest sites as they typed. No fewer than 25% of Firefox 3 refuseniks cited this as the reason they wouldn’t upgrade. In fact, almost all of the people who provided feedback had tried Firefox 3, didn’t like what they saw, and headed back to Firefox 2.

“When we expanded the capabilities of the location bar to search against all history and bookmarks in Firefox 3, a lot of people contacted us to say that they had certain bookmarks they didn’t really want to have displayed,” Firefox’s principal designer, Alex Faaborg, tactfully explains on the Mozilla Blog of Metrics.

“In some cases users had intentionally hidden these bookmarks in deep hierarchies of folders, somewhat similar to how one might hide a physical object. Having something from your previous browsing displayed to someone else who is using your computer (or even worse) to a large audience of people as you are giving a presentation, is really one of the most embarrassing things that Firefox can do to you.”

There’s little doubt, then, that Firefox 3 had caused more than its fair share of domestic showdowns, as unsuspecting partners accidentally stumbled across sites that were previously buried in a folder called something like “Dave’s really boring bookmarks, nothing to see here”.

No wonder Mozilla hastily introduce a Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5…

The first design is fairly typical Firefox, with the tabs beneath the address bar (click to enlarge):

The Aero effect looks nice, and it’s a very clean interface, with only minor changes from the Firefox 3.7 concept images which Mozilla recently released. But there’s also a mockup with the tabs – unusually for Firefox – moved above the address bar:

I actually think it looks better that way, as the address/search bar to me is part of the tab I’m using, not a distinct element that works over all the tabs. But then I’m one of the few people who use Google Chrome as my main browser, and if you look at Chrome’s current design it’s easy to see why I like that Firefox layout.

Look familiar?

You can see more of the Firefox 4 mockups over on Mozilla’s wiki page, and there’s an interesting point near the bottom about the thinking behind some of the designs.

“I guess the idea of having a combined go/refresh button is good. It will help the users who are just switching from IE.”

I’ve been noticing for a while now that all the main browser designs seem to be converging, and this comment adds weight to that. If this is the way the designers are thinking, give it another year and Microsoft’s EU browser troubles will be irrelevant – they’ll all look the same.