A couple of days ago I mentioned that my Android phone browser was increasingly a better tool for doing the things I actually use the web for that anything on my desktop. It integrates properly with Twitter and FB, it's quick at checking the nine or ten applications I regularly use with a single click and of course it's always there, always on.
After a few hours of playing with Rockmelt it seems that my desktop browser has now at least caught up again with my phone, and added some benefits into the bargain.
First, it's a perfectly good browser. I don't seem to have lost any functionality from Firefox (my browser of choice for the last six years), it's responsive and works and basically passes the doesn't suck test.
Second, it integrates with Twitter and Facebook. Well, sort of. I can share URLs in a tweet with a click, which is the key social media integration function my phone had and none of my browsers did. FB chat integrates with it nicely, I just tried that out and it works fine. And when I loaded Rockmelt up it showed me all my recent tweets and FB updates, which is nice.
But an hour later, it's showing new FB updates but the same tweets (yes, my connection is working, thanks for asking) which rather misses the point of Twitter. It aso hasn't picked up that lots of my FB friends have come online in the past hour. This isn't at all useful - if I'm going to to have to run a FB and Twitter tab anyway to actually see updates, what does "integration" really signify?
The app and feed bar on the right I'm using as a replacement RSS reader. Useful to have the main news sites I follow always-on...but if Twitter isn't updating I can't really trust the RSS feeds to either. And it's not perfect at finding RSS feeds - for example it doesn't seem to know there's one here or here and I had to dig around the sites for the pages the feeds sit on.
So...it's a beta test of something that, hopefully, will fulfill its potential soon. It works just fine as a browser; it's got a lot of very useful integration features that work already; and it's got several potentially useful integration features that don't work yet but hopefully will. Fair enough, that's beta for you. I like it, I feel like I could use it every day once the wrinkles are ironed out and hey, this is a thing I was specifically looking for the day before it launched so really I've not got a lot to complain about here.
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