RockMelt, which is launching in beta, is “challenging the conventional assumption that a browser is all about navigating pages.”

The company’s first blog post explains:

With RockMelt we’ve re-thought the user experience because a browser can and should be about more than simply navigating Web pages. Today, the browser connects you to your world. Why not build your world right into your browser?

Your friends are important to you, so we built them in. Now you’re able to chat, share that piano-playing-cat video everyone’s going to love, or just see what your friends are up to, regardless of what site you’re on. Your favorite sites are important to you, so we built them in too. Now you can access them from anywhere, without leaving the page you’re on. And RockMelt will tell you when something new happens.

On paper, RockMelt, which is built on Google’s Chromium open source browser project, looks intriguing. Consumption habits on the web have changed, and as we’ve seen in the mobile space, there are plenty of opportunities to create user experiences that allow consumers to interact with existing content and applications in new ways that are consistent with those changing consumption habits. From the looks of it, RockMelt is making a decent attempt to make using the internet and popular social networking services like Facebook a more seamless exercise.

Despite all this, it’s hard to see RockMelt gaining much mainstream traction any time soon. The browser market is highly-competitive and will be a very tough nut to crack. As a Facebook account is required to use RockMelt, the company has inherently limited its market to Facebook’s 500m registered users, and will have to convince them that there are no privacy issues with logging in to browse. Perhaps most importantly, history is not on RockMelt’s side. As others have noted, the makers of the Flock browser have done a good job making the browser more social but they haven’t been rewarded by the market for it.

At the end of the day, there is no doubt that, for many consumers, using the internet has become a ‘social’ experience. But it’s quite unclear whether or not there’s a need for an additional layer of ‘social’ at the browser level. Even for a billion-dollar behemoth like Google, browser market share is hard won. Reinventing the browsing experience, marketing that new experience and educating consumers will not be easy, nor will it be cheap.

Online telephone company Skype has been making headlines today for its impressive growth over the last year. According to new research from TeleGeography, Skype now accounts for 12% of all long distance calls.

But is the company eating its competitors’ lunches or growing the telephony market? Signs point to the latter. But that doesn’t mean long distance carriers have less to worry about.

Skype’s business model seems easy enough. The company offers free phone calls (and video) over the internet between its users. If a Skype user calls a landline, he or she is charged for that call, but even that cost is much lower than traditional phone company billing.

It seems like a pretty easy way to undercut the competition. But Skype’s exponential growth over the last year hasn’t really come at the expense of other companies. The company has grew its phone calling rates over 60% last year.

Paul Brodsky, an analyst for TeleGeography, tells The Wall Street Journal that Skype grew its rates cutting into the business of traditional phone companies:

“Skype is taking away would-be market share of international traffic from conventional phone companies.”

But that does not account for the fact that international voice traffic is still expected to grow around 7 to 8% annually between 2009 and 2011 according to TeleGeography.

How is that possible? Because Skype has actually created business for itself. Consumers who have sworn off international calling because of high fees are more than willing to try out a service that allows them to videoconference for free. And the 2009 numbers from Skype show that they liked what they saw.

Skype’s registered user number is impressive — the company had over 500 million registered users towards the end of 2009, versus 405 million registered users at the end of 2008. But because it is a free service, that number has less to do with the company’s health than how often people use its services.

And those numbers are more than healthy. In addition to its more than 50% growth in Skype-to-Skype traffic last year, Skype users are expected to generate 54 billion minutes in international traffic in 2009 compared to only 33 billion minutes in 2008. Meanwhile, Skype is now the largest long distance phone company in the world.

Meanwhile, Skype charges for its SkypeOut service, which lets users to make calls to standard telephones. Those calls generated about 12 billion minutes of traffic in 2009. Skype relies on traditional wholesale carriers to connect these calls to the telephone network.

If Skype was really cutting into traditional telephony business, that business would not have grown 8% from 2008 to 2009.

That’s not to say that the company won’t also steal business from more expensive competitors. But so far, Skype is not integrated into the telephone habits of most consumers the way that traditional phone carriers are.

Most Skypers are still using their computers to make calls and they are not using the service as an alternative to more expensive options, but to make calls where previously they would have chosen another mode of communication.

While telephone carriers should be afraid of Skype, it’s not because the online company has underpriced them. It’s because the company has gotten people excited about something that they had made difficult and avoidable.

Now that gives Skype room to go after the rest of their business in 2010. Especially when the service starts getting onto mobile phones.

As a webdesigner (and technologically savvy user of the Internet), there is no excuse for you not to be using Firefox as your primary web browser. If you aren’t using Firefox yet, you need to go and download it right now. Not only does Firefox provide a top of the line Internet browsing experience, but it also provides an endless amount of functionality that you simply won’t find in any other Internet browser.

Because third parties can develop add-ons for Firefox, by downloading the best add-ons that are available, you can transform Firefox into a tool that dramatically increases your productivity and saves you a countless amount of time.?? Since there are so many different add-ons available to download, it can be a little overwhelming to pick out which ones you should be using.

Therefore, I decided to do all of the legwork for you and compile a list of the six best Firefox add-ons for web designers.

1. Web Developer
2. Firebug
3. Colorzilla
4. Fireshot
5. CSS Validator/HTML Validator
6. Browser Window Resizer

A good news for all Safari fans. Safari 4 beta is released and is available for download on its site. It is available for Mac OS and Windows. Techcrunch is saying that the JavaScript engine of Safari 4 is 4x faster.

Some fantastic benchmarks at cnet.co.uk reveled that Safari 4 is fasted browser on planet till date. They used SunSpider suite of JavaScript tests to determine which browser was the quickest, and the Safari 4 beat every browser in terms of speed, on both a PC running Windows XP SP2, and a Mac running OS X 10.6 with all updates applied.

The graph revealed that Safari is 42 times faster than Internet Explorer 7, just over six times faster than Internet Explorer 8, 3.5 times faster than Firefox 3, and 1.2 times faster than Google Chrome.

I have just installed Safari 4 and checking the updates. Soon will post the updates here.