On Wednesday we silently rolled out the next-generation (now current generation) version of Socialbrowse! Those of you with the extension installed will notice some re-design and several bug fixes.

Those of you browsing without the extension will notice something incredibly different. Socialbrowse now
comes with its own mini-browser and there is no longer a need for the Firefox Extension!

We wanted Socialbrowse to expand out of the scope of just Firefox. To do this Zack and I had 2 options:

1. Build an equivalent extension for IE, Safari, Chrome, etc.


2. limit the power/functionality of Socialbrowse

We thought those options both sucked so we invented our own option C. Option C was to build a platform that would meet the following conditions

• no installation
  
• works on all major browsers
  
• provides all of the power of a browser extension
  
• easily extensible
  
• no loss of any Socialbrowse features
  
• no loss to the browsing experience
  
• minimal/no loss to browsing speed
  

The result is a mini Socialbrowse browser that works inside of your normal browser. Users can simply visit http://socialbrowse.com and start browsing in the Socialbrowse browser. There's no installation or signup required and no loss of features!

No one had ever made anything with all of those features so it was a big problem to tackle and a big question as to whether it would even work. Fortunately it does, and we're very pleased with the outcome.

The new Socialbrowse is still very much in beta mode. There are bugs and some web pages don't render properly. Bear with us as we work through these and feel free to send us links to pages that are screwed up.

We're also working a great deal on the scalability of the platform which is why we've chosen to do a soft (quiet) launch first and have held back on deploying some of the more viral features we've built. With every user's client polling our backend servers every 10 to 15 seconds the entire time that they're online, our servers undergo a heavy load that we're still trying to manage. We encourage you to invite others and tell your friends, but until we officially launch, please refrain from blogging about it or inspiring large waves of traffic. But don't worry, that day will come very soon.