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…

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 been messing around with the developer build of Chrome just recently and it’s made my browsing life considerably more interesting – much in the way that bowling hand grenades would really spice up a Test Match.

For anybody unaware of Google’s peculiar approach to Chrome’s development it runs like this: a wild-eyed Chrome developer wakes up at 2am with an idea so cool that in Microsoft’s secret underground lair Steve Ballmer orders half-a-dozen cats to kick out of windows. He doesn’t know why, he’d just knows he’s angry and some kittens will have to pay.

Unfortunately, this idea is also so cool that it could conceivably bring about internet Armageddon. The solution: instead of inflicting the idea on the fifteen or twenty people using the stable Chrome release, our bedraggled Chrome developer sticks it into the developer build where it can wreak havoc without anybody getting hurt. He then pokes and prods the idea until it settles down, accepts its fate in Chrome’s brave new browser world and complies, or else he destroys it with his code voodoo. This is the world of Google; stern but benevolent – to borrow a line from Pinky and Brain.

Those ideas that beg for forgiveness from their Mountain View overlords and, you know, work and stuff, are boosted to the next rung up on the development ladder – the beta version of Chrome. The beta version of Chrome is what Burma is to Afghanistan; still a little bit unsafe, but stick to the secure bits and there’s every chance of leaving with your legs. The new homepage is an example of this progression, it’s been sat in the developer build for not-literally donkey’s years and has made the coveted beta cut, where it’ll sit for a further not-literally donkey’s years.

Eventually, after Google’s sure the new homepage isn’t some Microsoft funded, fifth-column trick to bring Chrome and its fifteen users to their knees, it’ll be sprinkled in baby tears, have the face of Schmidt tattooed on its bottom and be welcomed to the final development stage, the stable, Chrome release. Google being Google though, you can sign up to any of these releases and tinker to your heart’s content – hence my experiments with the developer’s build.

I initially installed it because I wanted to check out Google’s theme support, the first step towards the promised extension nirvana. Summary: themes work; they’re gaudier than an Elvis fan’s taste in curtains; Firefox’s are still considerably better. It’s early days though.

That should have been it, and would have been, except the developer build is so fast it’s like being escorted across the internet by a polite hurricane. And like a hurricane, you’re never entirely sure what it’s going to do next. The developer builds are updated every night, which means when you open Chrome in the morning anything could have happened. Well not anything, your hands won’t fall off or anything like that. I’d check the Ts&Cs first though.

At the beginning of the week I switched Chrome on to discover that new homepage I’ve been blathering about. That’s nice, thought I, scoffing down a lovely sticky bun. The following day my bookmark bar had disappeared. A quick scoot about revealed it would only appear when I opened a new page. Themes came and went, new options saunter into the menu bars, decide they don’t like the furniture and leave again. It’s like Google’s a mischievous imp that keeps rearranging the furniture in my house every time I go to sleep. Only this morning I woke up to find that imp waving at me through the window with a dentonator in one hand and a bazooka in the other. With a gleeful chuckle Chrome promptly exploded, returning the following lovely boo-boo message every time I tried to start it up.

It’s not come back on yet, which makes me think that a Google Developer woke up at 2am in the morning with an idea that refused to be tamed. It might come back on, or it might not. Either way, I can’t wait to see what’s waiting for me tomorrow. This unstable browser lark is bloody good fun.