The New York Times reported on Friday that the Andreessen-backed startup will somehow incorporate Facebook user names in its browser, so that users could presumably interact with their friends on the social network while they’re surfing around the Web. Andreessen currently sits on Facebook's board, but the newspaper reports that Facebook is not explicitly connected to the project. That wouldn’t prevent RockMelt from tapping into the social network's API, a code that makes Facebook data available to other Web sites and services.

What makes Andreessen think the market will support another Web browser? Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still owns the lion’s share, 68%, of the market, though Mozilla’s Firefox continues to steadily gain ground with 22%, according to data tracker Net Applications. The next two most used browsers, Safari and Chrome, have yet to surpass 10% market share combined, but Apple and Google are investing heavily in those products.

Apparently a heck of a lot of people still use them, though: A startup called Conduit has made a profitable business out of helping 200,000 Web publishers and businesses--mostly small (like the Pretentious Pooch pet store in Baltimore), many overseas, but some large ones like Major League Baseball--offer them to some 60 million active users. The publishers like them because they can essentially syndicate their Web sites right onto people's browsers. That way, the publishers have a better chance to get people coming back to their sites to use their various services--that is, if they can get past the reservations of people like me.

(To get a taste of what the toolbars look like, here's the promo for Major League Baseball's toolbar, and here's TechCrunch's, as well as a gallery of many others.)

Now, Conduit, which lets publishers create custom toolbars, is looking to blow open toolbars so that they may become more attractive both to publishers (and maybe to me).