Rockmelt Crashes and Burns: Nobody’s Extinguishing The Flames

We were planning on writing about Rockmelt, a new social browser that is the modern-day Flock of Chromium, here on Techi today, but it appears that the browser is having a rocky start. After installing it, giving it access to Facebook, and finally starting the browser, the social magic that should have been has turned into disaster.

Where there is originally supposed to be a bar on the left and right sides of the browser to show me my friends and social website connections, there is nothing. In fact, much of the browser, at this point is useless. All I am left with is a little swirly icon on the top-left of the browser that gets me nowhere.

I’m not the only one. I’ve received several Tweets from people confirming that they are having trouble, too.

Instead of us praising Rockmelt, it has now revealed a critical flaw. The browser’s core functionality is completely broken at this point, and it is probably because it relies on Facebook’s API. It could be just a glitch in the system, or it could be something more serious like Facebook actually blocking Rockmelt. Either way, it reveals that the browser is not ready for the primetime.

Sadly, I can’t even use the “share” link on the browser to share content with friends, which is supposedly tied into the Facebook API as well.

Of course, this is a new product that is only being released to those who are invited, but I can already see that this is a huge problem. I believe Rockmelt talked about investing the time to consider other ways to “login” to Rockmelt, but I believe the company should forego any such attempt. The browser should not rely on any single service to operate, as is being proven right now.

It should just work. Instead, at this point in time, it doesn’t offer me anything but the same basic functionality as a Chromium browser. Sigh.

Anyways, below is a screen shot showing what the browser should look like. But this rocky start has already left a bad taste in my mouth.

Update: After a long time of reloading Rocketmelt, I finally got it to sign in correctly. So now this is actually what Rocketmelt looks like from my perspective, at least when it actually works: