The two companies said today that together they are developing a new browser engine for Android and the ARM architecture. Called Servo, the engine will be written in Mozilla’s new Rust programming language, optimized for multi-core computing and, in the words of Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich, designed to cast aside “old assumptions” about how a browser engine should work.

An interesting project, but a more interesting alliance. What is Samsung, the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile devices running Google’s Android OS, doing collaborating on a mobile Web browser with Mozilla, which in case you’d forgotten is also hard at work on a mobile operating system? Samsung shipped 215.8 million handsets last year, and pretty much all of them ran Android. And with them it captured nearly 40 percent of the global market for smartphones, according to IDC. Given that, why is Samsung bothering with Servo, an alternative to Android’s built-in browser and Google’s Chrome?

The most likely explanation: This is one more hedge against the company’s big bet on Android. It’s no secret that Samsung’s dominance of the Android device market is straining the company’s relationship with Google. And the company’s heavy reliance on Android could become problematic once Google starts really leveraging its Motorola Mobility acquisition. As much as Android has been a winning platform for Samsung, it’s also a vulnerability. With that in mind, the company has already begun diversifying away from Android by making devices powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone OS and co-developing with Intel an entirely new mobile OS called Tizen. This new alliance with Mozilla is just an expansion of that effort.

“Samsung’s partnership with Mozilla … diversifies Samsung’s reliance, at least as much as possible, on Android,” Rajeev Chand, managing director at boutique investment bank Rutberg & Co., told AllThingsD. “Samsung continues to have a strategic weakness in its reliance on an ecosystem that the company does not own.”

Mozilla’s recent announcement to block all third-party cookies by default in the new version of Firefox has sparked renewed interest in these topics, and as you would expect, opinions vary wildly depending on perspective and priorities. Reactions from those representing the ad industry predominantly have been critical, while many privacy advocates have applauded the decision. My reaction was one of frustration for several reasons, but one in particular that is relevant to this discussion — my company builds and sells a product that is used by advertisers and ad agencies to “track” what is happening online.

Common Theme, Different Issues

To adequately discuss privacy, you must first define what it is you’re discussing. Currently, there are two major movements being debated, both of which involve the way Web browsers and providers of online content (predominantly publishers and advertisers) exchange and store information.

First, the Do Not Track (DNT) HTTP header was designed in conjunction with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is intended to provide consumers with a standard way to indicate to Web applications, digital advertisers and publishers they do not wish to have their behavior tracked across Web properties. All major browsers currently support this feature and the industry is moving toward adopting it as a standard; however, last year Microsoft announced that beginning with Internet Explorer 10, it would enable DNT by default, subsequently causing widespread confusion since the header was designed to be opt-in, not opt-out. For this reason, the vast majority of publishers and advertisers currently ignore all stated DNT preferences, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Mozilla’s recent announcement involves a separate debate about whether or not browsers will accept third-party cookies. For the uninitiated, cookies are small files that include data that allow your computer to interact with the websites you visit. Third-party cookies traditionally are set by advertising companies and analytics firms, such as mine, to help understand what is happening on a website over a certain period of time. Prior to Mozilla’s announcement, only Safari blocked third-party cookies by default among the major browser providers. However, Mozilla’s market share (approximately 20 percent according to Net Applications) is much larger than Safari’s and represents “critical mass,” thus the renewed interest in this topic.

Why We Track

Companies track information online for different reasons. In the analytics world, our business is one of scale. Unlike behavioral targeting, our business model is predicated on the ability to identify correlation across millions of advertising “events” and making recommendations based on huge data sets across large-scale media campaigns.

Typically, advertisers purchase huge inventories of ads across a large number of sites their desired audiences frequent. Each of these ads has a different price associated with it, which increasingly is determined by demand and effectiveness. To make sure they get what they pay for, advertisers often choose to work with an analytics firm to better understand which ad campaigns and channels (search, display, etc.) are more effective and why. As a simple example, browser cookies allow us to determine which advertising is resonating with consumers and how many times that message should be displayed before it gets annoying and loses effectiveness, allowing advertisers to avoid waste and poor experiences.

Unintended Consequences

By most estimates, the first online ad appeared roughly 20 years ago. As a technology, cookies have been used for almost as long. They also serve as a fundamental component that underpins the economics of the open web. Small and upcoming publishers rely on the data provided through third-party advertising technologies to quantify and price the “real estate” accompanying their content, often selling ad inventory as part of large-scale networks that provide reach and attract larger advertising customers. Without these networks, it’s difficult to see these publishers attracting ad revenue necessary to compete and offer high-quality, ad-supported content. Paywalls will also become more prevalent for those publishers that have sufficient resources and audiences to support them.

Also, by eliminating the ability for publishers/advertisers to price and purchase higher-quality placements based on relevance, you can expect a return to “spray and pray” tactics where ad inventory prices plummet and the total number of ads displayed and purchased rises drastically. In other words, if you think some ads are disruptive today, get ready to see much more aggressive tactics employed.

Lastly, while cookies are a relatively mature technology with existing browser controls, industry opt-outs and comprehensive privacy policies, there are alternate tracking approaches that don’t have the same level of consumer control. These alternate methods — including device fingerprinting, flash cookies, local storage, etc. — represent the Wild West of tracking technologies. They are very difficult to detect, lack proper controls and can be abused by fringe tracking companies. None of them represent progress or improvement for the customer.

Choice

The advertising community takes privacy seriously and we agree with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), National Advertising Initiative, Digital Advertising Alliance and other organizations advocating for the continued development of existing consumer-choice mechanisms. We welcome participation from Mozilla and other browser vendors that seek to deliver easy and transparent privacy solutions to consumers; however, these need to be developed in concert with both advertisers and publishers to be effective.

Paul Pellman is the CEO of Adometry, Inc., a marketing analytics provider that generates insights about the performance of marketing campaigns through combining and interpreting advertising data from online and offline channels. Prior to joining Adometry, he was executive vice president of marketing for Hoover’s.

Plus, it is open.

“In general, I feel friendly toward them. … open is good,” Andy Rubin said in a roundtable with reporters at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday. “Competition is good. We built Android because there was no open operating system.”

Rubin said he is glad to find himself in competition with more open operating systems than closed ones.

Getting more people with access to the Web benefits Google more broadly, he said.

“There are places where Android can’t go,” he said, referring to memory and other hardware requirements. Firefox can help reach those. “For certain markets, it makes sense.”

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First off, carriers love anything that threatens to lessen the power of Apple and Android. It’s why they always express hope and optimism for any new release of Windows or BlackBerry and have for years.

“Duopolies are not beneficial for any industry,” Telefonica CEO Cesar Alierta said onstage at Mozilla’s press conference on Sunday. Telefonica is betting very big on Firefox OS, bringing it to several countries this year and to all its markets by the end of next year.

Even with BlackBerry and Windows Phone, Telecom Italia CEO Franco Bernabè says there is enough opportunity for Firefox and even Tizen, a mobile version of Linux.

“I think there is room for all of them,” Bernabè said in a brief interview at the Mozilla event. “The only thing we don’t want is to have two monopolies dominating the market.”

But Firefox offers two additional benefits beyond just offering carriers a chance to knock Google and Apple down a peg.

The first of these is cost. The operating system, like Android, is free. But even more than that, it is designed to run well on low-end hardware where Android performs poorly or can’t run at all.

Secondly, Firefox is open. Carriers can do whatever they want, from running their own apps and services to branding and anything else.

That could give Firefox and Tizen a leg up on BlackBerry and Microsoft, Bernabè said. “In our opinion, who will prevail will be the open source platforms.”

There is still a huge challenge, though. Firefox OS actually has to run well. And that’s where the carrier’s dreams could end.

The list of companies that bet too early and too heavily on HTML is a long one that includes, most notably, Facebook, which has since reversed course and focused heavily on native work for iOS and Android.

Analysts say Firefox has lined up an impressive array of partners but still has a lot of work to do in order to deliver a product that will sell.

“The real acid test for Firefox OS and its long-term prospects is the quality of the software itself and the user and developer experiences that it fosters,” said Ovum analyst Tony Cripps. “What is clear from the Firefox OS demonstration handsets that we have seen was that they are still some way from being market ready, being both slow and buggy.”

Even low-cost smartphones have to work well, Cripps said, noting that there is increasing competition from Android as well as the latest generation of feature phones such as Nokia’s Asha touch line and Samsung’s Rex phones.

Meanwhile, the U.S. could prove an even tougher nut to crack. The home market is on Mozilla’s radar, but not the top priority, says CEO Gary Kovacs. The company announced Sprint as a partner, but didn’t give any details and Kovacs said the U.S. probably won’t see its first Firefox OS devices until 2014.

The company brought together several of its early partners in Barcelona to show the progress it has made in the months since it first unveiled the Firefox OS project.

The browser maker is looking to create for the phone an operating system similar to what Google is trying on the desktop with Chrome OS. It has been showing previews of the software since last year and last month said it was readying preview hardware for developers to begin testing apps.

Mozilla is among a number of companies seeking to provide an alternative to Android and iOS. It’s a crowded field, though, that includes BlackBerry, Microsoft and Canonical.

Among those slated to be on hand for the company’s press conference include the chiefs of carriers Deutsche Telekom, Telekom Italia, Telnor and Telefónica as well as Paul Jacobs, CEO of chipmaker Qualcomm.

We’ll have live coverage of the event when it kicks off around 9 am PT on Sunday. And Mozilla chief Gary Kovacs will have more to say about Firefox when he appears in April as part of our D: Dive Into Mobile conference.

5:36 pm Barcelona time: The event won’t begin for another 20 minutes or so, but the information is starting to trickle out. Among the additional partner names that have cropped up here at the event is Sprint.

5:47 pm: Telefonica R&D CEO Carlos Domingo is getting mobbed by reporters, most of whom want to get a photo of the Firefox OS phone he is holding.

5:49 pm: It looks like device makers LG, Huawei, ZTE and Alcatel One Touch are on board as well.

Alcatel, LG and ZTE will build the first devices, with Huawei’s first Firefox OS phones coming on later in the year.

Here’s ZTE’s phone:

Which looks to be headed to Telefonica’s movistar brand.

Telefonica plans a broad launch with devices headed to Brazil, Colombia, Spain and Venezuela around mid-year with more European and Latin American countries later in the year and into 2014. It will have models from Alcatel One Touch, LG and ZTE.

Here’s a look at an Alcatel model:

6:09 pm: Firefox CEO Gary Kovacs kicks off the company’s press conference with a shout out to the company’s co-founders Mitchell Baker and Brendan Eich, who are in the audience.

6:10 pm: Kovacs has some trouble advancing his slides, quips he is using an iPhone to control them.

Kovacs notes that when the company announced its phone OS plans last year it had only a couple early partners and it now has support from 17 carriers and several hardware makers.

6:12 pm: “We’re on the edge of unlocking mobile,” Kovacs says.

6:14 pm: Kovacs notes that his company isn’t profit-driven and won’t be with Firefox OS; the company’s goal is just to keep the Web at the center of things. That will keep power from being concentrated in one or two app stores, to allow lots of over-the-top services and support Web standards.

There shouldn’t be one or two companies that can approve the content seen by billions of people.

“That’s a broken model and it needs to change,” he said.

Kovacs asks all the partners at the event to stand, noting that it’s not easy to support version one of a product.

“I know you are not timid,” he said. “I’m on the phone with you.”

Initial handset makers, as we noted, are ZTE, Alcatel One Touch, LG and Huawei.

“There are more coming,” he said.

6:16 pm: Speaking now is Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs touting HTML5. (Of course, Qualcomm’s chips also power a ton of Android phones and all Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 devices.)

6:25 pm: Demo time.

Things start out simple and easy, says Firefox’s Jay Sullivan. That’s because most Firefox OS customers will be coming from feature phones.

There will be a Firefox Marketplace to highlight Web apps, but the company isn’t asking developers to do anything different.

“We’re not looking to create a new ecosystem,” Sullivan said.

Among the early Web apps for the Firefox Marketplace are: AccuWeather, AirBnB, Box, Cut the Rope, Facebook, MTV Brasil, Pulse News, SoundCloud, SporTV, Terra, Time Out and Twitter.

And maps are kind of important, Sullivan notes, adding that Firefox has been working with Nokia to make sure its Here Maps work well under Firefox OS.

6:29 pm: Sullivan notes that even though Firefox OS is Web-based lots of things can be cached, even running in Airplane mode. He demos it with an issue of Time Out Barcelona stored for offline reading.

And while Mozilla will have a marketplace, they won’t be the only one, meaning there can be lots of vertical marketplaces as well as the option for device makers to distribute directly.

Mozilla also has an open model for payments, including a carrier billing option.

6:36 pm: Sullivan touting ability to dynamically configure phone for a point in time, like having a bunch of movie-related content for Oscar night without requiring a user to visit an app store.

6:39 pm: Now Mozilla is trotting out the carriers supporting Firefox OS, starting with Franco Bernabe, CEO of Telecom Italia, followed by Telefonica CEO Cesar Alierta.

Telefonica plans to introduce Firefox OS devices in many markets this year and in all of its markets around the world by the end of next year.

“Duopolies are not beneficial for any industry” and Firefox OS should help, Alierta said.

6:53 pm: Deutsche Telekom CEO Rene Obermann said that his company will launch first in Poland this summer and then expand to other Eastern European markets, if all goes well there.

Latin American carrier America Movil said it plans to launch Firefox OS devices in all the countries where it operates.

6:55 pm: Q and A time.

Asked how Firefox OS will stand out from Android and iOS devices, Kovacs said that they can deliver mid- to high-end smartphone performance for the price of a high-end feature phone.

In terms of the United States, Kovacs said the company has plans for its home market. “We have partners lined up,” he said. “It’s not the first launch country,” he added, saying devices are likely in the U.S. next year.

Notably, Sprint — which is listed as a partner — didn’t speak at the event, which just wrapped up.

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The two “developer preview” devices are being created in partnership with Geeksphone and Spanish carrier Telefonica. Telefonica has already said it will support the Web-based operating system on commercial devices expected later this year.

“Developer preview phones will help make the mobile web more accessible to more people,” Mozilla said in a blog posting on Tuesday. “Developers are critical to the web and to Mozilla’s mission to make the web accessible to everyone.”

The preview devices are unlocked. The low-end model, dubbed Keon, features a Qualcomm S1 processor and 3.5-inch touchscreen, among other features. A higher-end model, Peak, features a dual-core Qualcomm chip and a 4.3-inch screen.

Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs will talk more about the Firefox OS project when he takes the stage at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference in April.

Yahoo appears to be rolling out the newest version of the redesign of its homepage even more extensively across several major browsers, including Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

As AllThingsD has previously reported several times, the Silicon Valley Internet giant has been working on a new homepage look, designed to improve its declining consumer usage.

The latest look has been present on all my browsers all day, rather than cycling off to the old version as before. The design is cleaner, with a more touchscreen tablet approach, new icons, and a scrolling news feature. With a more mobile feel, it’s slightly different than previous new versions that Yahoo has been testing over the last few months.

After redoing its Yahoo Mail and Flickr photo-sharing service, sources inside the company said that Yahoo is now close to launching the new homepage. It’s part of an effort called Project Homerun and also a larger effort called Project Zed, which will also include more personalization and a focus on bringing in a range of third-party content.

More on what that means soon …

Until then, here are three different screenshots from tonight from Chrome, Safari and Firefox:

I say that in jest, of course. But, yes, another contender has stepped up to the plate. On Wednesday, Canonical shared more details on Ubuntu, the Android-based operating system aimed squarely at taking the third-place seat behind the two current market leaders, Android and iOS.

I won’t get too far into the woods explaining the differences from Android proper — which are mostly pretty nerdy — but Canonical is positioning the OS as “more immersive, less cluttered” and easily navigable. The company also claims it is strong enough to function as a PC, which means that it can hook up to desktop peripherals and work like any old computer (though that sort of implementation wasn’t a huge draw for Motorola).

Here’s the thing. RIM already has a strong (though waning) foothold in the market. Microsoft is pumping hundreds of millions into its Windows Phone bet. And third-place contenders of the past, like webOS, have tried and failed to gain a meaningful following.

Even if you disregard those big players, there are others fighting for the title. Firefox will compete with a browser-based OS, and then there’s the Linux-based Tizen in development by Intel, Samsung and others.

So it’s hard for me to see how Ubuntu, which isn’t expected to ship on smartphones until at least 2014, will put up a decent fight.

Still, you can’t win if you don’t try. Good luck with that, Canonical.

Given that, it is not terribly surprising that Mozilla and carrier partner Telefonica are part of a $25 million investment round in Everything.Me, an Israeli start-up focused on helping create such programs. That said, it is the first time that Mozilla has taken part in the equity funding of a start-up.

The company, which originally had the less catchy name Do@, raised $3.5 million earlier this year from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures.

The vision behind Everything.me, which started out more along the lines of mobile search, has evolved with its various rounds of funding.

These days, the company is positioning its service as a way to connect with the apps already on a user’s device, as well as other apps and services available from the cloud.

Mozilla’s Jay Sullivan says there is a very close alignment between what Everything.me is doing and Mozilla’s vision of a browser-based operating system.

“It’s a really good combination of what’s great about apps, and what’s great about the Web,” Sullivan said in a telephone interview.

The company isn’t sharing either its number of users or any details on how it plans to make money. It is currently available via HTML5 and as an iOS app, with plans for an Android version, as well.

Everything.me says it will continue to do native apps alongside its HTML5-only program, saying that it wants to reach as many people as possible.

The foundation and its subsidiaries had $163 million in revenue in 2011, up 33 percent from $123 million in 2010.

But Mozilla’s expenses also grew considerably, causing a decline in net cash flow to $13.4 million in 2011 from $21.7 million in 2010.

The biggest increase in expenses came from the cost of software development, with $103 million in 2011 compared to $62.8 million in 2010. The increased cost was due to investment in new products, said Mozilla CFO Jim Cook.

“This represents our continued technology development investments in the future of Mozilla as we quickly move from primarily a one-product organization (Firefox desktop) to multiple products and services with both a mobile and global focus,” Cook said.

The timing and format of the yearly financials release as well as the results of an audit were in keeping with Mozilla’s status as a non-profit.

But the timing is also important for Mozilla as it tries to connect its past and present — the Firefox browser — with its future — the Firefox OS for mobile.

Mozilla has put significant development effort into its new open mobile alternative operating system, and plans to launch its first Firefox OS phones in Latin America in 2013 with partner Telefónica.

As for Mozilla’s financials going forward, the organization doesn’t offer guidance. But based on previous reporting, we do know that late last year Google agreed to pay on the order of $300 million per year to continue to be the default search provider in Firefox. So even as Mozilla pours development resources into mobile, its cash cow is only getting richer.

As for mobile-specific monetization, Mozilla noted that it should make money from OEMs, operators and app publishers for the Firefox Marketplace.

For the occasion of the financials release, Mozilla also created an annual report about its “mobilized” vision in the form of a microsite.

Said the site,

Just like we did on the desktop, Mozilla is setting out to ensure that the mobile Web is full of freedom, choice and opportunity and that it has the ability for users to create anything they want. With Firefox OS, we can break open the world of native operating systems and closed platforms once again.

Mozilla does continue to develop its Firefox for the desktop, even though it may not be growing and driving innovation like it once was. On that front, the annual report highlighted Firefox’s security and memory enhancements and developer tools over the past year, as well as its upcoming social API tools.

It also noted that Mozilla counts improvements and other Firefox-like changes in other browsers as a form of success — for instance, Google adding Do Not Track to the Chrome browser.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has said that location will be one of five key businesses for Nokia going forward, alongside smartphones, basic phones, patents and cellular infrastructure.

Nokia powers maps for Rand McNally, Garmin, Bing, Yahoo Maps and others, and its map business has been growing, Elop said, noting that there has been 75 times more usage in the last year alone over the prior year.

“Our location data is very, very fresh,” Elop said, speaking at a Nokia mapping event in San Francisco.

But the company can do more. “Maps and location experiences should inspire us to sense our world. That is what Nokia is doing.”

Here, Elop said, will work across multiple devices and operating systems. He has also made reference to the acquisition of a 3-D mapping service, promising more details to come.

The benefit of having its mapping know-how in a single cloud service is improved scale, Nokia said.

“We need to translate usage into better services,” said Michael Halbherr, the Nokia executive VP in charge of the new service.

Nokia also needs to get data from a variety of sources, from its own data-capturing cars to crowdsourced databases to users of its own services, Halbherr said.

Notes from the mapping event:

Update, 9:33 am PT: Nokia confirms that it has acquired Earthmine, a California-based 3-D mapping company.

9:35 am: Halbherr shows how mapping data can reveal a new road, suggesting when a map needs to be updated. He shows Ufa, a city in Russia that got a new road this year, indicating a need for the map to be updated.

The community can also help improve Nokia’s mapping in regions where the company doesn’t have good data, such as Myanmar. There, users have added more than 7,000 kilometers of road data. A map-creator tool combines satellite imagery with user-added information such as the street name and whether it is one-way or two-way.

Updates can appear in minutes or hours, Halbherr said. “We really want to build a community,” he said, noting that the company wants to offer reputation indices and give higher rights to those with a strong track record.

9:39 am: Nokia’s Here mapping service can be found here. The site allows users to get directions, build “collections” of favorite locations and help add their own contributions to Nokia’s maps with the map-creator tool.

9:44 am: An FAQ details some of Here’s new services, including hotel booking in some locations, and technical requirements of the service, including which browsers support which features.

9:47 am: Here’s the Web site for Earthmine, the 3-D mapping company Nokia has acquired.

9:49 am: Even though much of the intelligence is in the cloud, Halbherr said a good mapping service also needs to have offline capabilities, especially on the phone, for when service is spotty, or to avoid large charges when roaming internationally.

9:51 am: Nokia said it will make an Android software development kit available in 2013, to allow device makers to include Here services on their products.

9:53 am: Nokia is also announcing a partnership with Mozilla to bring Here maps to its Firefox OS.

9:55 am Nokia is planning an iOS mapping app that puts its HTML5-based service into a native app. That will require Apple’s approval, which Halbherr said the company expects in the next couple of weeks. It sounds like that Here app will have voice-guided walking — but not driving — directions.

9:56 am: Now up is Peter Skillman, head of design for Nokia’s location business. After Halbherr talked technical details, Skillman said he wants to talk about the broader experience.

We want a better way to answer the questions you have during the day, Skillman said. The result is not a single mapping app, but many apps, depending on whether one wants a taco or transit directions home.

“It’s not just a place that’s alive, but a place with context,” Skillman said.

10:04 am: Skillman shows the site in 3-D, as the crowd puts on old-fashioned red-and-blue glasses.

He then notes the iOS experience, saying Nokia is doing that on the off-chance that there might be a few iPhone owners who want better mapping. He shows live traffic, public transit and other features not found in Apple maps. There are turn-by-turn driving directions, but the voice-guided navigation is only for walking.

10:10 am: Clicking on a spot in the iOS app will bring up the 25 most popular places nearby. In some cases, such as malls, Nokia has in-venue maps.

10:28 am: Nokia plans to expand its augmented-reality technology beyond the City Lens app and into its core maps application, and eventually allow other people to build their own apps around the know-how.

Skillman shows off a variety of potential uses for the technology, including tagging photos with a location and tagging your car so you’ll remember where it was parked.

10:30 am: Oprah time, as the company says it is handing out Nokia Lumia 920s to the crowd.

10:31 am: Q&A time, but Elop is not out for questions, at least not yet.

When it comes to indoor locations, there are 18,000 buildings covered so far, Nokia says.

Finally, someone asks about the business model. We haven’t heard a single question about dollars.

“We are a technology licensing company,” Nokia exec Halbherr says, but doesn’t give a ton of details. The iOS app is free for the consumer, with the potential to make money from advertising or deals.

10:43 am: Asked about the fact that some of its rivals have higher-resolution imagery, Halbherr said that Nokia plans to increase that over time.

And, with that, time to map a course to the Diet Coke.

The event is still taking place. Check back for updates.

It’s nothing like your grandpa’s Safari. RockMelt for iPad caters to the shifting attitudes we have in the way we experience content on tablets. The result is an attractive mish-mash of an interface design that borrows heavily from Facebook’s Timeline, Pinterest’s tiles and Twitter’s ever-flowing stream.

As CEO Eric Vishria puts it: “It is unquestionably a really different beast. And that is a good thing.”

Philosophically, RockMelt as a product builds on top of the two predominant schools of thought in how we browse the Web today. Google champions intent-based search — type in a word, receive endless pages of links. Social surfing, the other school, posits that our friends are better referrers of new content than any algorithm. While still nascent, the meteoric rise of Facebook and Twitter, and their ability to deliver massive traffic around the Web, give the theory legs.

RockMelt exists somewhere in the space between the two. First launched in 2010, it’s a browser like Chrome or Firefox but with deeply integrated social features. Navigating the Web, the idea goes, shouldn’t rely on either philosophy entirely, but incorporate the best of both worlds.

As browsing has changed over the past two years, we’ve shifted on other fronts as well. We’re moving from desktops to smartphones. From text to visuals, from the static to the stream.

Confused? Here’s an example: Don’t expect a browser window defined by the blank search bar up top. Open the app and integrate it with your Facebook and Twitter accounts, and you’re presented with a never-ending stream of squares and rectangles of different stories, populated by the people you’re connected to. It’s sort of like a portal site, only it is one curated by the folks whose views you (presumably) care about.

The reasoning here: First, the mobile browser market is clogged with competitors. Dolphin, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Chrome — each one offers similar functionality, comes in a similar layout, all battling for the same slice of the mobile browser marketshare. RockMelt’s drastically different appearance, according to co-founder (and ex-Netscape veep) Tim Howes, makes it stand out among its contemporaries.

Second, consider the medium. We don’t use tablets in the same manner as we do our desktops. IPads are seen primarily as consumption-first devices, amenable to displaying products and content in easily swipe-able, fast-scrolling ways. There’s a reason sites like Fab.com and The Fancy have such high rates of purchasing through tablets.

So RockMelt for iPad takes our habit and works with it, presenting stories in pop-out panes that make content look more attractive.

“The thing about the Web is that it’s vast,” Vishria told me. “But it’s dirty.” RockMelt tries to solve the problem, as Vishria puts it, of combining the expansive nature of the Web with the beauty and richness of an app. Hence the new presentation.

Third, there’s the social component. Along with Facebook and Twitter integration, RockMelt builds another social layer into the browser itself. You can follow others who use the application, and the app will suggest more stories to you based on what they’re sharing. Moreover, you’re able to comment, share and add an array of “Like”-type emotions to each article (sort of like Buzzfeed’s “LOL” or “WTF” subcategories). The idea here is, not only will content circulate externally via Facebook and Twitter sharing, but internally via RockMelt’s additional social layer.

I’ve played with the application for the past two weeks, using it both with and without some of the social components. I’ll say this: It is attractive. It is fast. And to be frank, the initial feeling was jarring. When I imagine using a browser, I expect to experience the Web in a certain way, navigating my usual haunts via search bar, going to Facebook or Twitter only on occasion.

With RockMelt’s app, I feel like I’m browsing shelves in a store. I haven’t decided quite yet if that’s a good thing or bad thing.

Is this something I could come back to repeatedly? Is this too much of a shock to the system that I’m used to, the standby of the white search bar, the blank page?

Vishria believes that the process of discovery — the neat, pretty way content is wrapped up in little packages and presented to the user — will be what draws us in. Browsing and exploration will be what keeps us there. And to be fair, the search bar is still there — it’s just not the focal point.

Obviously the jury’s out on this — at least until the app has been in the wild for a few months or so.

To get a better sense of the product, check out RockMelt’s commercial below (complete with Honey Badger commentary).

The move is the latest indication that handset makers are looking beyond Google Inc.’s dominant Android mobile operating system as they try to diversify the software platforms for their smartphones and other mobile devices. While Apple Inc.’s iPhone uses its own iOS software, most other smartphones sold around the world are powered by Android.

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