Rockmelt Blog

Welcome to RockMelt Beta 5 - Social Omnibox, App Center, and much more

Just in time for the holidays, RockMelt Beta 5 is here! We wanted to give you a present to finish 2011 with a bang, so we’ve been working non-stop to get RockMelt Beta 5 ready. 

Since you spend seven hours a day using RockMelt, Beta 5 was built to let you do all the things you love even faster and easier: staying in touch with friends, getting new updates from your favorite sites, and discovering sweet new content.

Here’s what’s new:

Social Omnibox

The omnibox has been completely re-designed to help you find what you’re looking for even faster. 

A big reason why chat is one of our most popular features — RockMelters now have seven chat conversations each day, up from three conversations six months ago — is because it’s so simple and accessible. With the new Facebook timelines rolling out, we wanted to make staying in touch with friends just as simple. So we built your friends into the omnibox. Now, when you enter a friend’s name into the Social Omnibox, you can navigate directly to their timeline or start a conversation. 

But the Social Omnibox isn’t just for friends. If you type in the name of an app, you’ll also see options to open or add apps. For convenience, you can use your keyboard’s arrow keys to pick and choose which action you’d like to take.

To try it out, just type a friend’s name into the omnibox.

The NEW New Tab

The brand new New Tab page (yes, double the NEW, just for you) lets you stay in touch with friends quickly. Pop open a new tab and you’ll see your friends’ pictures, have quick access to their profiles and even birthday reminders. Now, you won’t have any excuse not to wish them a Happy Birthday!  

Plus, we’ve added a ticker of your friends’ recent Social Reading activity in the top-right corner so you’ll never miss great new content. With a new “read” being shared among friends every second, Social Reading is a big hit.  But more importantly, it’s clear from your feedback that you love to discover the latest news (or cat videos) through your friends serendipitously. That’s why we built the Social Reading ticker right into New Tab page.

Open a new tab to take it for a spin!

Expandable, Scrollable App Edge

The App Edge is one of our favorite features because it makes reading news fun and easy (especially with Social Reading). It’s clear that you love the App Edge too: on average, RockMelters have 12 apps and click on them 26 times a day! 

That’s why we’ve made the App Edge better than ever. Now, the App Edge supports scrolling so you can add as many apps as you want and still navigate the Edge with ease. Don’t forget you can reorder the app icons by dragging and dropping them along the edge. Plus, it can now be expanded for easier app management. 

Try it for yourself by clicking the button at the bottom of the App Edge.

App Center

Because you love the App Edge so much, we wanted to make it easier to discover cool new apps and add apps from your favorite sites. That’s why we built the new App Center.

The App Center is a one-stop shop for everything apps. To open the App Center, click the + button at the top of your App Edge. Then, simply click on the icons of the sites in the App Center to start getting instant news from them in your App Edge. 

We have a lot more ideas for the App Center in the near future, so stay tuned.

EZ Text Sharing

Sharing text can now be done faster than ever. Select the text you want to share and right click to choose “Share text.” The text and link to the current page will automatically be included in a new Share window. Works like magic. No better! Works like computer science!

How to Upgrade to Beta 5

Your RockMelt will automatically upgrade over the next few days but you can upgrade immediately to RockMelt Beta 5 now by going to RockMelt menu > About RockMelt.

Happy browsing and happy holidays,
The RockMelt team

Posted 1 year ago
315 notes
Tagged: browser, rockmelt, social, facebook, .