RoamAbout – Stay Connected to Friends While Browsing

RoamAbout is a free plugin for IE and Firefox. It allows you access to your favorite web applications, such as YouTube and Wikipedia without you having to leave the current page. Using a toolbar located at the bottom of your browser window, you can be notified on new e-mails and messages on various social networks as well as being kept up to speed with regularly updated content such as RSS feeds and news.

At first glance, RoamAbout seems to be a very useful bit of software. The toolbar at the bottom of your window is mildly intrusive, but bearable and the applications open in a handy little window that still provides access to the rest of your browser window. This is particularly useful when you need to look something up on Wikipedia for instance whilst browsing an online shopping site.

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However, it’s not all plain sailing for this free web browsing aid. The toolbar makes the loading of your browser painfully slow, particularly if (like in my case) you load up a lot of tabs on start up. Also, more than once whilst I was using it, the bar disappeared completely, refusing to load back up and then causing my browser to stop responding.

The fancy graphics on the user interface may look pretty, but render every mouse click on the bar much slower than it should be, with the Tray in particular loading very slowly. I can see it being useful for those who don’t have more than one or two tabs open and want to keep up to date with social networks without having them open. However, for the power user it seems to be more of a hindrance than a help. If you are looking for strong social networking features in your browser, you can try Flock.

So it seems that this free web browsing aid has sacrificed functionality in an effort to make itself look prettier, meaning that, if you are a power user, your time would probably be best spent looking for a better alternative that is less likely to reduce your web browser to a slobbering wreck of crashes. KlipFolio Dashboard or RainMeter would be a better choice.

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