RockMelt started developing its social browser in 2009, and went into private beta in November 2010. At the time, the word of mouth buzz made it something worth checking out, but didn’t really stick. It had nothing to do with the product though, it turns out that RockMelt was about three years ahead of its time.

The company has $39M in funding from top tier venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, and Accel Partners, so clearly they’re on to something. But what, exactly? How can a browser company that is built on the same codebase as Google’s Chrome warrant so much funding? It turns out that a keen focus on social is the answer to that question.

I spoke to RockMelt’s co-founder and CEO Eric Vishria yesterday about what he sees as the biggest year of opportunity for browsers since their inception.

2011 was a year to remember

As we reported in November, Internet Explorer fell under 50% in browser market share for the first time ever. Along with Google “buying its way to #2″ as Vishria puts it, and Firefox seeing a slight decline for the first time since its launch, the browser market will be more competitive than ever in 2012.

With everything on the web becoming more social, it makes sense that browsers would take that leap too. Or at least browsers with social features, as RockMelt hopes. Vishria also called 2011 the end of the battle between two giants:

In a few years, we’ll look back and say that it was the end of the war between Google and Microsoft. We’ll also say that it was the beginning of the war between Facebook and Google.

While that led me to ask Vishria if he thought RockMelt’s partner, Facebook, would create its own browser, he said “It seems pretty clear that Facebook is dedicated to partnerships”. That sounds like a no, and since Facebook has over 800 million users, they’ll visit the site no matter what browser they’re using.

Identity and Communication

When referring to browsers of yesteryear, RockMelt’s CEO called them “big dumb windows”, meaning you’d type in a web address, go somewhere and interact. It wasn’t until Firefox that a search box first appeared in the toolbar of a browser, and that alone has caused more search activity than ever, which is why Google renewed its contract with the number two browser.

Rockmelt says that 80% of searches done using its browser are through its toolbar, and the company is banking on its mostly under 35 audience wanting to take more actions from what it calls the “OmniBox” as well.

For example, when using RockMelt, you can you connect with Facebook and that will allow you to take a few social actions based on searches that are autocompleted for you. In this example, when searching for “Brett”, I’m able to go directly to his Facebook profile, chat with him through the browser, or write something on his wall:

These might be things you can do in Chrome or Firefox with an extension or add-on, but RockMelt thinks that younger users who just want to be social aren’t interested in searching something like the Chrome store for what could be a strong native feature. Speaking to the social nature of RockMelt users, Vishria shared that an average RockMelt user performs seven chats a day. Instead of downloading another app or going to Facebook’s site, its users can chat right through the browser.

Social isn’t the only focus for RockMelt, it wants to build a great experience for mobile, and will tackle tablets first. It currently has an iOS app that syncs all of your bookmarks and accounts onto your iPhone, but I’m told that the company wants to push the envelope in mobile browsing, which as Vishria puts it, “sucks right now”.

Market share be gone

While overall market share for browsers does tell us who the big players are, a smaller piece of the pie, say just 5%, could equal millions of users for a company like RockMelt. Any company who can get its community to install its software on more than one device on average definitely has a shot to come in and steal a small piece of the overall pie. Having been in public beta since April 2011, the best is yet to come for RockMelt.

The browser also lets you share the things you read without having to click a button, and those items will fly past your friends eyes on the Facebook ticker, thanks to RockMelt’s partnership with the social network. It’s features like this and an engaged community that could help RockMelt become a success, without the need or intent of using millions of dollars for marketing like some have. When you have a social product that people like, word of mouth goes a long way.

With three years under its belt in the browser game, RockMelt isn’t going anywhere. And even though many might narrowly focus on market share, the company is focused on making its users happier and more social.

➤ RockMelt

According to Microsoft, it’s now time to say goodbye to Internet Explorer 6, officially. The browser launched 10 years ago, and the IE team has been closely watching its usage data so it could say goodbye.

In a blog post today, the team announced that usage of the browser has dipped under 1% in the US, following similar usage patterns in Austria, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway.

The browser was a bear to design for and I’m sure that there’s a collective sigh of appreciation all over the Internet to see it die.

Here’s what the IE team had to say about the natural demise of IE6:

We couldn’t have done this without the help of the community and our IE6 Countdown partners – thank you to everyone for your support. Since we launched IE6 Countdown, we’ve had over 2.75 million visitors and 5.6 million page views of the site – it’s clear people are using the content and taking the action to heart! If you’ve attended any events with us in the past few weeks you’ll know that we’ve been expecting this any day now and we’ve had a great time sharing a few drinks and toasts with you in anticipation of this moment.

Clearly, even Microsoft can laugh at how long the browser hung on, showing that Windows users are afraid to update pretty much anything that they’re used to using.

Goodbye IE6, RIP.

It appears that Facebook has stopped supporting Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 browser, according to our friends at The Sociable.

While this isn’t surprising since the browser is five years old, it is a bit of a hack for those who would rather not use Facebook’s Timeline feature to browse the site. It’s not perfect though, since along with dropping Timeline, IE7 also screws up the page a bit with extra white space:

Once you get past all of that though, it’s the same old Facebook that we’ve used for years:

Even if you’re not a PC user, you can spoof your browser’s user agent to emulate IE7 quite easily with Safari.

Just go to Preferences > Advanced > Show Develop Menu In Bar

Once you do that, just click Develop and User Agent like so:

You can even clean up that ugly white space by installing a script called F.B. Purity. That’s a lot of work to get around having to see a Timeline on Facebook, but if you’re geeky, have the time and want the challenge, go for it!

Firefox and Google Chrome continue to rise, with 21.20% and 16.59% of the browser market share respectively. Even though Apple continues to sell more and more mobile devices with its Safari browser, the company only holds 8.54% of total browser usage.

The difference in browser share could be due to applications being available on the Firefox and Chrome platforms, whereas Internet Explorer seems stale at this point.

With more Google devices shipping with Chrome and Chrome OS, you can expect the market share for Chrome to rise dramatically in 2012. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer will more than likely continue to plummet.

Internet Explorer may be struggling but Microsoft’s Hotmail is growing… thanks to the iPhone.

It was announced today that Yahoo is shutting down the popular social bookmarking service Delicious.  So we thought we’d help you out with some solutions to export the bookmarks to other services.

Users have a few different choices. You can choose to export your bookmarks into an html file and import them into your browser or directly import using services like Diigo, Xmarks and Faviki.

Export Your HTML

After logging into Delicious users can export the bookmarks along with their tags into a single html file.  This file can then be added to most browsers by opening the bookmarks tool bar and locating the “import “ feature.  On Firefox an import can be achieved by going to Bookmarks > Bookmarks toolbar > click on the icon with the star> import.

Delicious mentions..
If you choose the option to include your tags, they will be in your export even if you don’t see them on the page — you can view the source of the file to make sure your tags are there. Also note that if you have created tag bundles, they will not be preserved in your exported file. This is a limitation of the export file format.

Choose Your Service

With Delicious leaving, you might want to fill the void by signing to up one of the following bookmark services. Each one of these services will import your current Delicious bookmarks. We’ve picked out five that we think you’ll love, and we’ll walk you through importing your links to each of them.

Xmarks

Xmarks integrates with your browser and helps you to keep bookmarks safely backed up –including Delicious bookmarks.  Xmarks can sync information across the following supported browsers; Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari.

To import Delicious bookmarks users simply log-in and go to the web portal http://my.xmarks.com.  After locating the “tools” option in the menu select import bookmarks from Delicious.  Now, there is one problem with using this method because there’s a limit on the number of public bookmarks you can import.  If you have more than 100, your best bet is importing the html file into your browser ( as we mentioned above ) and then syncing Xmarks with the browser.

Diigo

Diigo is a bookmarking service and more. This service will allow you to highlight text and attach notes to webpages or create sticky notes.  And, it also gives users the option to import Delicious bookmarks.

You have two options here. You can import the html file or you can punch in your delicious account details and import directly. The problem here is that due to frequency limitations on Delicious’ API,  if you try to import all of the bookmarks at once your request may be denied. Again, importing the html file may save you some frustration.

Pinboard

Pinboard is another great alternative to using Delicious. This service is a low-noise, simple, bookmarking site that will enable you to import your Delicious html file.  To do this just go to the settings in your Pinboard account and choose the file.  After that the import will begin.

Mister Wong

Mister Wong is a straight-forward bookmarking service to share and save websites. It imports quite a few different services and browsers including Twitter (links), Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and Delicious. Mister Wong gives you two options; upload the Delicious html file or directly import using your Delicious log in.

Historio.us

Historio.us is delightfully lightweight, simple, nothing fancy, many of the things that are beautiful about Pinboard, but it has the ability to bookmark in a flash and be able to search for ANY word in the pages you’ve bookmarked.

So how to import? Quite simple. Export your delicious bookmarks as per the above instructions and then import the file into Historio.us by visiting settings, then import/export. I’d provide the link but its custom to your account name, so http://yourusername.historio.us/add/.

Faviki

Faviki is a bookmarking tool that allows users to bookmark web pages using Wikipedia terms. With this service, all users use the same tags which makes searching bookmarks really easy.

After logging in to Faviki you will see an import feature on the top of the page. The import feature will ask you for the delicious ID & password and will begin the process. Unlike other services we’ve seen, Faviki gives users control over tags before the import by allowing “tag editing”. Unfortunately it doesn’t happen right away, it appears to take a few days but when it’s complete Faviki will send you a confirmation email.

Not Delicious But Still Tasty

I’m sad to see Delicious go but like any service there are a lot of sweet alternatives out there. Do you know of a great bookmarking service? I’d love to hear about it, please post your tips in the comments. Additionally, there’s been a call from the community to keep Delicious open source. What are your thoughts?