Hasta La Gadget!

It was a good ride while it lasted, but the browser wars haven’t been kind to Rockmelt, which has announced that it’ll cease supporting its socially-inclined desktop browser sometime in the next few months. The decision was made because keeping up with the steady stream of updates for Chromium, the code upon which the Rockmelt browser was based, was simply too costly.

In its place, the company has announced Rockmelt for Web, a portal that may serve to alleviate some of the Reader rage many of us are experiencing. It aggregates content from “your favorite sites, your favorite people, and a dash of crazy stuff you never would have discovered,” so it’s like a combination of RSS, social networks and StumbleUpon. It’s an invite-only beta for now, though users of the browser and iOS app have already been invited to the party. The rest of you lot can get on the list by hitting the source and signing up.

Filed under: Internet, Software

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: Rockmelt Blog (1), (2), Rockmelt for Web

Word that Google had decided to fork WebKit and build its own rendering engine is still echoing through the spidery halls of the internet. The true ramifications aren’t entirely clear yet, but Opera has pledged to embrace Blink and WebKit is already talking about removing Chrome-specific code from its repositories. This doesn’t necessarily indicate a seismic shift in the industry, but it certainly suggests that we won’t be looking at a world so thoroughly dominated by the direct descendant of KHTML. At least at first, the new entrant won’t actually deviate much from WebKit. Primarily the focus will be on stripping away unnecessary code and files to streamline the rendering engine specifically for Chrome. Obviously, this won’t prevent other developers from using Blink, since the project is open source. But Google has been pretty up front about the rationale behind the fork — the multi-process architecture favored by Chromium-based projects is quite different than that used in other WebKit browsers. This has, to put it in the plainest terms possible, kinda gummed up the works.

Blink is about 10 weeks away from landing in the stable version of Chrome (it’s expected to be turned on by default in version 28), but it’s already available as part of the Canary build. We downloaded the experimental browser and spent some time with it in an effort to identify what, if anything, was different. Keep reading after the break to find out just what Google has bought by shedding some of WebKit’s baggage.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Google announced last night that it’s going to stop using WebKit—the rendering engine currently used by the likes of Safari and Chrome to display web pages—in favor of its own solution which will be called Blink. More »

Google Now could very well soon be integrated into Google’s Windows browser as well as the Chrome OS platform, as it was spotted in a new reference that was left behind by engineers in the most recent Chromium release. Of course, this particular bit of sleuthing was achieved by Chromium enthusiast François Beaufort, where it was noticed that a new flag was thrown into the mix that is known as the Chromium backend, where it enables users to turn on the option should they know the relevant Google Now server. Of course, being what it is at the moment, the feature has yet to be made public, and this means that Google Now cards (some call it notifications) will not be displayed – yet.

For the moment, Google Now will most probably be enabled in Chrome for Windows, without any sight of a Mac version to date, as well as in Chrome OS, although there is no concrete date as to when this might happen. Let us keep our fingers crossed that it will be sooner rather than later.

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A new version of Chromium for Windows was released recently, and which already should be cause for celebration, but it seems an eagle-eyed developer has spotted some code within the latest build in order to allow for a notification center to be enabled.

In order to see the notification center for yourself, you’ll need to toggle the “Enable Rich Notifications” flag in chrome://flags once you download the latest build of Chromium for Windows. The notification center pops up like you would expect towards the bottom right of the Chromium browser and can be dismissed by clicked on the cross in the upper-right corner of the notification. A “Clear All” function is also available, which could hint at the possibility of multiple notifications alerting the user.

The addition of a notification center to Chromium may hint at a future release to Google’s Chrome browser. Not only that, but the code may also hint at support for Google Now in Chrome somewhere down the line.

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