Like most of you, I was a quick convert to Firefox a few years back. When compared to IE6, it was an absolute treat. If nothing else, the tabs and the extensions made Firefox the browser to beat. Add to that better security and a rendering engine that actually worked, and there simply was no competition.
A couple years later, I am still a huge fan of Firefox but with Firefox 3 on the horizon I wanted to point you in the direction of what for some of you might be a worthy successor to everyone’s favorite Fox.
Yea, I know. Version 0.7 was an absolute mess, but the newest version of Flock is definitely worth your time.
Birds Of A Feather
Flock is a “social web browser” based on the Firefox code base. That means that converts will be treated to pretty much the same experience as they have come to expect out of Firefox, except with a whole lot of other widgets thrown on top.
First let me say that the best part of Flock is that you can ignore most of the more irritating “Social Features” of the browser, but for those of us who need to integrate our digital empires into one dashboard, Flock makes this exceptionally easy.
If you are on a site with an RSS Feed, just click a button and add it to the built in feed reader.
If you want a side-bar to keep track of what your Twitter friends are doing, just open one up using their “people” panel.
If you want to whip up a blog post on the fly, you can do that too with their built in editor.
Surprisingly enough, for all the stuff they have packed into this browser — it runs light. In fact, it feels a lot less heavy than Firefox has since version 1.5. Then again, I hear rumors that Flock is based on that particular version of the Fox’s code base.
All the social “stuff” aside, the real selling point of this browser is its speed. I do most of my writing from a three year old laptop, which in computer years dates it to just about the end of the Mesozoic. Using Firefox for more than twenty minutes almost always leads to a slow and painful death, often involving me force exiting the program just to get my computer to stop churning.
So far, Flock has run without a hitch. This is with my usual 8 to 10 tabs open.
What are the downsides? Well, you don’t have access to some of your extensions but that can mostly be solved with a little hackery courtesy of Frobba.
Beyond that, seasoned Firefox users should have no problems at all getting used to the browser.
