The inventor of the Netscape Internet browser is investing in a startup called RockMelt. The company is building a new Internet browser to join a market where Microsoft Internet Explorer reigns supreme, Firefox is gaining ground, and new players like Google Chrome are looking for an opportunity.

"Does the world really need another browser?" asked Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret. "It's starting to feel like 1999 all over again with browser wars and new versions of browsers."

RockMelt's Hot Browser Moves

According to a report in The New York Times, Andreessen thinks RockMelt could come up with a new browser that is different from what's available today. "There are all kinds of things that you would do differently if you are building a browser from scratch," Andreessen told the Times. Nothing more is known. RockMelt's Web site merely invites people to sign up for updates.

"Mark Andreessen is a person with a pretty deep history of browsing experience," Gartenberg said. "If RockMelt has piqued his interest, perhaps there's some sort of story to be told here that hasn't been told before. But at this point the idea of yet another browser coming into the market is going to be challenging."

Challenging because the browser industry has already made the shift from focusing on features to focusing on speed. Gartenberg isn't sure what twist RockMelt might introduce that would shift browsers forward, since consumers seem satisfied with the speed of today's browsers.

"With all the new browsers we've seen, the browser is not the bottleneck. If you have to start measuring things with a stopwatch, then you are not gaining all that much more benefit from a speed perspective," Gartenberg said. "It's definitely hard to imagine consumers looking for another browsing experience. It would have to be something very, very different in order for it to have an impact."

Andreessen's Investment Approach

Andreessen teamed with Ben Horowitz, his Netscape colleague, to form Andreessen Horowitz in July. The firm's first fund totals $300 million. It isn't clear how much of that was invested in RockMelt, but the firm was founded to make investments ranging from $50,000 to $50 million.

Andreessen Horowitz described a "new philosophical approach" to venture-capital investing: Rather than being bound by tight restrictions on investment size or stage focus, the firm is open to committing any amount, up to $50 million, at various stages of a company's life.

The firm focuses on investing in startups in the technology sector, including consumer Internet companies, cloud computing, networking , enterprise applications, and social-media businesses. Andreessen and Horowitz may take board seats in their portfolio companies.

Andreessen and Horowitz are no strangers to investing in startups. Since 2004, they have acted as angel investors for more than 45 companies, including Aliph (Jawbone), ExtraHop, LinkedIn and Twitter.