We’re excited to introduce RockMelt Beta 2! While we’ve shipped 20 updates since November, RockMelt Beta 2 represents our most significant revision so far.
One thing we’re really proud of is how much people actually use RockMelt. People use RockMelt for more than 6 hours each day to share links, get quick previews with the search box, stay updated with App Edge notifications, and chat from the Friend Edge.
RockMelt Beta 2 doubles down on some of those features making them faster, easier and better. Here’s what’s new:
New Chat Experience
Did you know that people use chat more than 3 times per day? Chat is one of our most popular features and people love it because of how easy and accessible it is.
But we realized that while it was easy to talk with one person at a time, having multiple conversations was more difficult with all the separate chat windows. This was our most-requested feature so we decided to completely re-design the experience.
With our new chat bar, chatting with multiple people has never been easier. Chats are now docked in the chat bar along the bottom of RockMelt so they’ll stay visible while browsing. We’ve also created subtle notifications for new incoming messages so they aren’t distracting. Of course, chats can still be dragged off of the chat bar and made into separate windows like before.
New View Later App
When we set out to re-invent the browser, we quickly learned that bookmarking has really changed. With features like autocomplete, most-visited sites on the new tab page, and search built into the address bar, many people no longer use bookmarks.
On the other hand, we love services like Instapaper and how easy they make it to save websites to read when we have more time. These services inspired us to build View Later deeply into the browser.
With View Later, people can save any URL and any links from the App Edge to read later. This includes individual posts from Facebook, Twitter and other feeds. Find something you want to come back to later? Just click the clock icon to add it to your View Later. Of course, as with everything in RockMelt, View Later is sync’ed so you can access it everywhere you login.
New Twitter App
If you’re one of the 50% of RockMelt users who have connected their Twitter accounts, you’re going to love our new Twitter App.
It doesn’t just look better, it’s packed with new features. Now, in addition to your lists and @mentions, you can also edit retweets, view direct messages, reply to all users, and search Twitter easily. Did we mention that it uses the real-time API so you get updates instantly?
Chromium 10
RockMelt is now better and faster than ever with the latest Chromium updates.
We’ll start updating users to RockMelt Beta 2 today and everybody should have it in a week or so. We can’t wait to see what you think of the big changes.
Happy browsing!
(and no, this is not an April Fool’s joke)
P.S. In addition to all the great features, we’re on a never-ending quest to improve stability and performance. In this revision, we’ve fixed 78 bugs to make RockMelt Beta 2 the most stable and fastest version yet.
Bugs Fixed
- Improved support for Chrome themes
- Fixed issue with the Twitter App not displaying notifications for new tweets
- Fixed issues with audio playback when watching videos inside the Twitter App
- Improved reliability of sync for feeds
- Improved overall RSS feed reliability
- Fixed several causes of crashes
