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.

One of the main reasons why developers may not be making the move to HTML5 as yet is the perceived lack of support for legacy browsers. This is actually untrue, and whilst there might be some jiggery pokery required for proper backwards compatibility, it’s still possible.

Of course, by legacy browsers I mean Internet Explorer, as all the other major players update regularly and their users tend to follow suit: browsers such as Firefox, Safari and Opera have supported HTML5 for a while. Some developers may decide to stop supporting IE6, but for some that’s not an option and, at any rate, neither IE7 nor IE8 support HTML5 either. IE9 will, but it runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7 only, so the other versions will still be around for a long time to come, as we have seen with IE6.

So what needs to be done to get HTML5 working in Internet Explorer?

Unknown elements

Well first and foremost, IE won’t render any elements it doesn’t recognise, so it will completely ignore HTML5 structural elements such as header, footer, article, section, and nav, all major parts of a HTML5 site. This can be rectified by telling IE about these elements using JavaScript. The best way to do this is to include the HTML5 shiv script, created by Remy Sharp. This handy script creates all the relevant HTML5 elements which IE will now know about when rendering the page.

One problem with this is that it won’t work for users who have JavaScript turned off. Unfortunately there is no way around this, so a decision has to be made by the developer to either use HTML5 or stay with HTML 4.01.

Styling

Most browsers have internal stylesheets that, amongst other things, apply display:block to block level elements. Whilst some of the newer browsers now do this for the relevant HTML5 elements, some don’t, and this needs to be added for all browsers. Simply adding the following styling will do the trick:

article, aside, figure, footer, header, hgroup,
menu, nav, section { display:block; }

Form elements

And what about some of the new elements themselves, such as the new input types - how do these render on legacy browsers?

Fine actually. Since the HTML5 spec was extended in a backwards-compatible way, any input types that aren’t recognised, are simply treated as text and will simple be rendered as so.

Multimedia

As I’ve discussed in the past, the video and audio elements are designed to allow a fall back to Flash, which will work fine on Internet Explorer.

The move to HTML5 will still be a gradual one, and some won’t see nor have the need to use any of the new functionality that it provides, but when they do, they can be (relatively) safe in the knowledge that older browsers will render their sites just fine.

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…

That can be the only explanation for the events of the past couple of days. First the company announced one of the most audacious moves I’ve ever seen with the Google Chrome Frame.

Not content with having its own browser, Google now wants to hijack Microsoft’s as well. Google Chrome Frame is an IE plug-in that replaces the IE rendering engine with the WebKit engine that underpins Chrome. Why? Because like the boy racers that hang around the McDonalds car park in my local town centre, Google wants to show off that it has the fastest engine.

Is this, as Google claims, an altruistic attempt to allow IE users “to seamlessly enjoy modern web apps at blazing speeds, through the familiar interface of the version of IE that they are currently using”? Pull the other one. The type of person who installs a new rendering engine in their web browser is the type of person who’s more than capable of downloading and installing Google Chrome for themselves.

Coupled with the fact that web developers need to add a line of code to their sites to make IE run the Chrome engine, and you can pretty much guarantee that this is going to be the nichest of niche features. Google Chrome Frame is nothing more than a cheap publicity stunt, designed to make Internet Explorer look bad and drive uptake of Chrome.

Another sign of Google’s anti-Microsoft agenda arrived with the launch of Picasa 3 yesterday (the most minor of updates, conveniently timed to coincide with the launch of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 – remember kids, do no evil). I installed Picasa 3 to take a poke around the new features yesterday, and then got a bit of a shock when I fired up Internet Explorer 8 later that evening.

A pop-up box appeared the moment I fired up the browser, telling me that “an [unnamed] application you installed wants to change your default search engine”.  I’ll leave you to figure out what search engine it wanted to change it to.

Google already has a monopoly-sized share of the search market – does it really need to sully the otherwise excellent Picasa with such dirty tricks? Or is it really just trying to pi** Microsoft off, after all?

No, I think there is another reason, but this is pure speculation. I think Microsoft is actually walking away from Internet Explorer because it knows the battle is going to move elsewhere. It’s a kind of inversion, but the logic goes like this.

HTML has never worked, and attempts to make it better will just wrestle any remaining control away from Microsoft. Other browsers are taking up market share, so it’s time to redefine the question. Up till now Silverlight has been a plug-in to the browser, and the latest version allows you to run a Silverlight application as standalone desktop application. Adobe has a similar platform with Flash.

Now wouldn’t it be a neat move to make a plug-in for Silverlight which renders HTML to Silverlight? This way, Silverlight becomes the “browser” and the HTML renderer is separately pluggable and upgradable. Microsoft is in fear that Adobe will do just this with Flash – and suddenly the browser has become platform independent.

It is not in Microsoft’s nature to walk away from a battle unless it has an alternative solution lined up. Silverlight as HTML renderer might just be the weapon it has chosen.

PC manufacturers will of course bundle a browser with any new Windows 7 PC, and I wouldn’t mind betting that the only browser the vast majority will choose to bundle is Internet Explorer.

And what about people who buy Windows 7 off the shelf? A spokesperson for Microsoft Europe said the company will provide a free IE8 CD-ROM with every retail copy of Windows 7. So the company’s still effectively bundling IE8 – it’s just making consumers jump through a few more hoops to install the browser. Utterly, utterly pointless.

However, the real pain is reserved for people who are buying Windows 7 as an upgrade. Previously you’ve been able to upgrade in place, meaning that all your Vista applications (including the browser) and data would be carried over to the new operating system. Microsoft says this won’t now be possible. “The E [European] version will require a clean install,” the Microsoft spokesman told us. “You’ll need to rebuild the default settings after installation.”

Unbelievably, the EU has still taken umbrage at Microsoft’s decision to hobble its own operating system. “Microsoft has apparently decided to supply retail consumers with a version of Windows without a web browser at all,” the Eurocrats claim in a statement. “Rather than more choice, Microsoft seems to have chosen to provide less.”

Yes, Microsoft could have chosen to bundle every browser under the sun with Windows, but even Firefox executives admit there’s no “good way” of doing that. So what was Microsoft meant to do? Bundle IE8 again and wait for the inevitable multi-million fine? Or take the scalpel out?

The EU and Opera have got exactly what they asked for. Let’s see what good it does them.

The widespread coverage of the IE flaw will be doing Microsoft no favours at a time when it’s struggling to fend off the emerging Google Chrome and the enduringly popular Firefox. Even worse, the pain was entirely self-inflicted.

News of the hole broke on Microsoft’s own Malware Protection Center blog, and while you have to admire the company’s candour, you can’t help but wonder if the bloggers inadvertently spun the threat for more than it was actually worth. 

“Based on our stats, since the vulnerability has gone public, roughly 0.2% of users worldwide may have been exposed to websites containing exploits of this latest vulnerability,” the post read.

“That percentage may seem low,” they said, building the suspense, “however it still means that a significant number of users have been affected.

“The trend for now is going upwards: we saw an increase of over 50% in the number of reports today compared to yesterday,” they concluded, using the kind of meaningless statistic you normally see bandied about by fledgling internet start-ups, who get their PR agencies to spin an increase from two to three registered users over the past month for all it’s (not) worth.  

Microsoft’s open approach to blogging – pioneered by the now-departed Robert Scoble – has definitely helped give the company a much-needed shot of personality. But that blog post would have been a damned-sight less alarmist had it gone through the company’s legions of press officers first. As I’m pretty sure all future posts from the Malware Protection Center will be… 

But it probably hasn’t seen this beautiful piece of, well, creativity from CnM – makers of the minibook or, as it’s sometimes called, the CnMbook.

Now this is a fascinating piece of kit that’s being sold for £115 exc VAT by Scan, and for a little more by Maplin. Indeed, if you search around you’ll find it on sale at various online stores.

In essence, it’s a 7in netbook based on a cut-down version of Debian Linux. One of the reasons it’s so cheap is the core components. No Intel Atom here, but a 400MHz Ingenic XBurst processor coupled with a whopping 128MB of RAM and a 2GB SSD drive.

But I digress, because what our friends at Microsoft will be far more interested in is CnM’s interesting choice of iconography. By default, this is what the web browser looks like – our friendly neighbourhood Firefox. (As yet another aside, CnM mysteriously uses Bon Echo, the beta release of Firefox 2, but that’s not important right now.)

What is important, at least to Microsoft’s legions of lawyers, is the way the icon switches to Internet Explorer – embedded within the Mozilla logo – when you hover over it with your mouse. As shown here.

Now I actually quite like the sheer derring-doo of this move, and it fits perfectly with the slight madness of the device itself. While it’s easy to get snobbish about a cheap device like this, with its faintly rubbish keyboard and mouse buttons that click at the volume of passing planes, the fact is it works.

It reminds me of those Franklin personal organisers you could buy (and probably still can) with 2K of RAM and a proprietary, very basic operating system. They worked, albeit with limited abilities to sync with a PC, and provided you didn’t push them beyond their limits you’d probably grow quite fond of them.

I’ve only been playing with the CnMbook for a day, and I’m already fond of it. It connects with ease to our wireless network and, once it’s taken a few lumbering seconds to load Firefox, browsing is a perfectly pleasant experience. Sure, it’s an 800 x 480 screen, but it’s bright, decent quality and surprisingly sharp.

Naturally, it isn’t going to knock the Samsung NC10 off its current A List netbook perch, but if all you really want is a netbook to browse the net then it’s got lots going for it. Just don’t tell Microsoft.

Sadly, our test laptop isn’t touchscreen, so we’re forced to rely on the demos and a brief play with a HP Touchsmart PC to form our early opinion on the multitouch features.

Touch works well on the Windows desktop. As soon as you tap the screen with your finger, the now redundant mouse cursor disappears, and images of water droplets appear underneath your finger, providing an intuitive visual guide to the accuracy of your finger jabbing.

The new larger icons on the Taskbar are much more touch friendly that the slender bars of XP or Vista, making it effortless to switch between different open windows. As we mentioned in the interface section, the new Taskbar jumplists can be activated by swishing your finger upwards, instantly spooling out a list of recent items or commands that are available to that application. Microsoft has sensibly made the jumplist text 25% larger when it detects you’re using the touchscreen controls, making it easier – if still not easy – to select the desired entry.

Touch-friendly applications?

The novelty of the multitouch controls starts to evaporate when you start using them in regular Windows applications, however. In Microsoft Word, for example, you can swish your finger up and down the screen to scroll through documents, with the entire window visibly shaking when you reach the top or bottom of the page, providing a clever visual cue. Word documents can also be zoomed in and out using the now familiar pinch controls. (Incidentally, PC Pro’s Jon Honeyball asked Microsoft if it was confident of avoiding legal action from Apple over the use of such touch controls; the question was elegantly sidestepped).

But applications such as Word will always, always require the use of mouse and keyboard. And frankly, scrolling through documents with a flick of the mouse wheel is just as simple as daubing your fingers across the screen, and potentially smearing the display. It’s touch for touch’s sake. Ditto Internet Explorer, where you can manually drag down the address bar in IE8 with a swish of the finger, but need the digits of an eight-year-old child to accurately pick out the tiny URL required from the drop-down menu. Swishing the finger left and right to replace the back and forward buttons in the browser is reasonably satisfying, but hardly necessary.

The multitouch controls are more at home in applications such as photo editing and drawing, especially now that the new Paint application has an Office 2007-style Ribbon interface, but we can’t help feeling that Microsoft needs to put a lot more thought into touch-friendly overlays if it really wants this feature to take off.

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.