smarterplanet:

“The father of the Web browser has started a second browser family. Marc Andreessen, co-author of the Mosaic browser and a well-known Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is backing a startup called RockMelt that aims to challenge Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla with a new Web browser, also called RockMelt. “RockMelt is onto something huge,” said Andreessen, general partner in venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, in a statement. “They’ve rethought the browser around the massive shifts in user behavior that will drive the Web over the next decade. RockMelt is the freshest, most innovative take on browsing since browsers were created.””

— RockMelt Offers Social Web Browser — InformationWeek

If by “challenge Google” you mean “build a browser on top of their open source project” then sure:

Any intro to RockMelt wouldn’t be complete without recognizing all the tremendous work that came before us—and which we’ve built upon. We’re based on Chromium, the open source project behind Google’s Chrome browser, which in turn is based on WebKit, the open source HTML layout engine used by Apple, as well as a host of other projects from Mozilla and others. (RockMelt’s Tumblr)

This isn’t even to mention the (arguably revolutionary) V8 JavaScript engine that Chrom(e)(ium) uses. That and the layout engine are kind of what make browsers browse—it’s certainly where the hard work of making better ones goes on.

My point isn’t that what RockMelt is doing isn’t cool, just that publications need to learn to see things other than conflict in the web tech industry. Reporting on sequential innovations as “challenges” to their foundations (open source ones no less) is dumb.

“Information Week” should probably be on top of the fact that standards and open projects and web service APIs make this sort of market-driven cooperation and collaboration possible. IBM probably shouldn’t be reblogging cartoonish characterizations that miss the point of a profound transformation in how the software used to access the web gets produced. Yes, back in the day there were “browser wars” (as Andreessen well knows, of course) but now even Microsoft is trying to impress the W3C fanboys and companies at each other’s throats for the mobile market work together on their browser software.

Sure, okay, maybe RockMelt just really blows everyone away and people even finally give up IE6 for it and Google throws up its hands and bails on Chrome the product and the Chromium project becomes primarily defined as the basis of RockMelt instead. Aside from the fact that I’m pretty sure Google would just buy the thing if that looked at all possible, I doubt anyone affiliated with RockMelt thinks that’s the plan. What is notable and interesting about RockMelt and similar things is precisely the fact that they exist at points of intersection and overlap where they can innovate and create value based on the huge strides made by larger organizations without having to compete with them.

Come on, people. I thought this shit was “web 2.0” (or whatever) boilerplate by now.