Flock: New Mozilla Kid On The Block
I have been using Firefox for a while now and there are obvious reasons why one loves to stick to Firefox. Flock takes Firefox to a whole new level. I know that there are a number of “flavor of the day” alternatives to browsing, but Flock is something that all a browser can be and still be a lot more! I love the set of goodies the browser comes equipped with. It is already my default browser and there are reasons aplenty why I would not change that.
The browser complements existing services of Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and 15 other services. It has a cool Media Bar feature that displays pictures and videos as a stream. Other features include an RSS feed reader, a sidebar that can display favorites, accounts (GMail, WordPress etc) and web clips, a blog editor and a photo uploader. There are three little buttons to the left of the address bar that ‘light up’ when you visit websites that have a media stream (such as YouTube and Flickr), rss feeds and an installable search engine (Wikipedia, for example, has one). Interesting pages can also be ’starred’, which is Flock lingo for ‘Add as favorite’.
While these are the pre-loaded features, there are several hundred extensions that can be added because the core of the browser is still Firefox. Some extensions may not be supported, but all popular ones are.
The layout can be confusing at first, and the ‘about:myworld’ may seem a little cluttered. But once you clear out the mess to only display what you like, you will start seeing how functional a browser can be.
Flock is being advertised as a Social Web Browser because it integrates with most of the popular social networking sites. For me, however, the browser is more than that and therefore, I would recommend this even if you dismiss social networking as a fad. There are a few shortcomings, but with growing popularity, increased attention and some clever thinking (they came up with a green edition in time for Earth Day), Flock may someday replace Firefox as the second most popular browser. I guess the Man was referring to this when he said “the Kid is the father of Dad” – or something like that!
Yep. They might replace Firefox. Only 200 million users to go to catch up.
anon
April 24, 2008 at 3:34 am
“anon said, on April 24th, 2008 at 3:34 am
Yep. They might replace Firefox. Only 200 million users to go to catch up.”
……. I was referring to 2011-24-04 when I said “Flock may someday replace Firefox as the second most popular browser”. Anyway, the folks at Flock are clear about which users they are targeting and who they are competing with -
http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/Flock-woos-Netscape-users-with-its-social-skills/0,339028227,339285764,00.htm
zerodefect
April 24, 2008 at 4:22 am