I think its bad news.
If Zynga, the biggest maker of social games do not want a social browser, maybe this means something.
Or not... See when Zynga aquired the Flock team, the rumors where that they want to get the senior team of flock, and make them work for zynga. http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/05/zynga-flock/
So now is just the annoucement of something that was already dead.
For normal people there's already a tool that does that: Facebook.com. Facebook is the Internet for a huge % of Internet users. I don't even think there is a pain-point.
There certainly are a few (at least) pain points with Facebook, even for "normal" users. Spam, for one. Something that makes it a little more accessible could take off, but a competing browser may not solve the pain points.
In all seriousness, what would that tool do? There may be a market for an app that will allow you to consume/manage your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc, from one central location.
OK. In all seriousness, my personal preference is a tool that would a)let me tag every connection, feed, and post arbitrarily, b)display the most common connections/posts/tags/posts-from-connection-tagged-x easily, c) let me specify tag groupings via drag-and-drop and command-line regex, d) handle all logins without jacking my privacy.
I'll pay you zero dollars for it, but I'll let you show me relevant ads on alternate Thursday. You in?
I just don't see this as a viable business (big enough market or a market sustainable by charging a large enough margin). It'd probably be a fun project to take on at one of the Hack-Weekend type events.
They collect a lot of personal information and considering Marc Andreessen is on the board of Facebook I won't trust a browser that has questionable practises like Facebook.
Regardless there are addons which do what RockMelt does. The UI also is off, even if someone doesn't realise it. It is behind in updates so not good for security reasons.
well if its got a deal with google similar to mozilla's it can make a good chunk of change with commissions on searches. mozilla generates well over $100M/year from google deal.
This figure appeared absurdly high to me on first glance, but Wikipedia says Mozilla earned $61.5M from search royalties in 2006. Total revenues were $104.3M in 2009, putting the estimated amount from search at around ~$90M. I don't know that that's necessarily all Google, but still an impressive sum.