Rockmelt was formerly a proprietary social media web browser developed by Tim Howes and Eric Vishria based on the Google Chromium project, incorporating social media features such as Facebook chat, Twitter notifications and widgetised areas for other content providers such as YouTube and local newspapers. The former Rockmelt web browser project was backed by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. As of April 2013, Rockmelt's desktop web browser is discontinued, and has been superseded by a collaborative project bringing together social elements from various sources, including Facebook, Forbes and Business Insider.
 

Although the browser was launched in private beta on November 8, 2010[3] for desktop, it is not currently supported on the PC or Mac due to work on the iPad and other mobile releases. Rockmelt is now exclusively for iOS (both iPhone and iPad), with versions for Android, Windows 8, and desktop planned.
 

Rockmelt was created by Rockmelt, Inc., located in Mountain View, California.The first version of their web browser was released November 8, 2010 and the final version, 2.2.0, was released February 9, 2013.
 

History

 

• November 7, 2010 - Rockmelt for PC and Mac launches in private beta

This version of Rockmelt was based on Google's open-source project Chromium. This is a cross-platform family of browsers that use the open-source web layout engine WebKit[6]—jointly built by Apple, Google, and the open-source community—and Google's V8 JavaScript engine, also open-source.

• March 11, 2011 - Rockmelt for PC and Mac launches in open beta 

• April 19, 2011 - Rockmelt for iPhone launches 

• October 11, 2012 - Rockmelt for iPad launches  

• December 20, 2012 - a new Rockmelt for iPhone launches 

Current version (2.2.0) of RockMelt is supported on iPad/iPhone/iPod only. Now developers are also being working on versions for Android, Windows and Mac. 
 

Reception

On December 13, 2010, Twitter included Rockmelt as the eighth most tweeted tech trend in 2010.