Having been a Mac user for going on several months now I’ve experimented with several different browsers, from Apple’s own Safari, to the ever popular Firefox and it’s OSXified cousin Camino. But Recently I switched permanently to Flock.
Flock is based on the FireFox browser but has been heavily modified to fit with all of the new great web services. I had tried the original developers release back on the PC and to be honest wasn’t entirely impressed. But the new Beta on OS X is stunning, both in looks and in functionality.
First and foremost, what is the difference between Flock and FireFox? Flock is deeply integrated with all the new Web 2.0 web services. For bookmarking it works with both del.icio.us and Shadows. I use del.icio.us so that’s what I will focus one. When you go to add a favorite or “Star” a page it allows you to add it to both your local bookmarks and your del.icio.us account, allowing you to add both tags and a description.
The other big feature is it’s integration with photo sharing services Flickr and PhotoBucket. Again I use Flickr so that’s what I will focus on. It has an integrated upload tool and it has “Topbar” that shows your Flickr photos in your browser and allows you to add those photos to your blog entries.
Which brings me to the next big draw of Flock, that beings its built in blog editor. While simple, it allows you to blog about current pages and drag-n-drop both photos and snippets of text in to the editor. It works with all major blogging platforms and has built in support for both Blog Categories and Technorati Tags.
The other stand out feature is the “My News” tool which is Flock’s RSS reader. By far this is the best RSS reader in any of the current generation of Browsers with a well designed page that is meant to imitate that of a newspaper. It is very simple(too simple?) to use even for those unfamiliar to RSS.
Never the less there are some problems. The del.icio.us posting tool lacks auto-completion of the tags and it doesn’t load your tags like almost any-other del.icio.us tool like Pukka or the plug-in available for Flock(which I use) and FireFox. Also the My News RSS reader does not easily all allow access to the actual XML link so that it can be added to an external Feed Reader such as the one I use, NetNewsWire. The new FireFox 2.0 has strong external feed reader integration and I expect that to be worked into future releases of Flock. Hopefully they will be able to also integrate with online feed readers like FeedLounge and NewsGator.
I highly recommend Flock to anyone who uses the above services and likes a fast, full-function browser. Flock will not disappoint and I look forward to seeing what the developers have in store for it.
Technorati Tags:
universalbinary, links, Flock, Browser, osx, firefox, web2.0, flickr, del.icio.us, review
