Marc Andreessen continues to nurture technology innovation with a new project called RockMelt.  Presented as an upcoming browser, Andreessen has already recruited former software engineer Robert John Churchill as part of his rock star team.  With frequent updates to Firefox and new initiatives for combining Google products with its browser Chrome, it’s clear the browser space is beginning to heat up as we reach a breaking point in the way we navigate and employ the web.

There aren’t many details that have been revealed about RockMelt, but it appears as though Facebook Connect will be an integral aspect of the new browser.  That would make it more social.  Perhaps this is an angle that is very important to the RockMelt project, and that would make sense to a certain degree.
So much of what we do on the web now is social.  Sites like Facebook consume a great deal of our daily web activity, and they are becoming central to the lives we carry out on the Internet.

Some other speculations have been made on how the revolutionary RockMelt browser could vastly improve the relatively static browser industry.  Things such as support for launching multiple web apps without having to login directly, and immediate social media sharing options are all reasonable expectations for the future of browsing.

But these are all trends we’ve been seeing take place for some time, thanks to the open platform browsers like Mozilla that have been spurring the development of third party browser add-ons.  Not to mention Flock, which is a very social browser, integrating several of the purported expectations but receiving much less of the publicity.

Real time search is another aspect of browsing behavior that could readily be integrated, but we may be turning to too many trends for an innovative browser product at this point.  Social media is fairly established in its dominance on the web, but things like real time search have yet to be fleshed out in an optimally usable manner.  And putting either or both of these front and center for a new browser product would merely remind me that whatever RockMelt turns out to be, I hope that it’s able to easily evolve to reflect the ever-changing times.

I’ve always appreciated the ways in which social browsers and browser add-ons can make my life easier.  When it comes to web activity, a browser is a vehicle by which we take in the web, so placing certain services in this omnipresent tool has always made sense to me.

But will it make sense to the average web user?  How much do they need a revolutionary browser?  Given the way in which Google is pushing its own Chrome browser with plans for future integration with its other products, I imagine any revolutionary browser would also need to consider its own future implementation for integrated products and services.  I’ll be interested to see if RockMelt has any plans towards this end, and how they play out with a certain amount of competition from Google and the more established Firefox.