Flock Browser

I first read about the Flock browser late last year. They were offering an alpha "developer's" release version for download. I downloaded it, but couldn't get much past its setup because it would crash. Then last week I saw that the browser was officially beta now with version 0.7 being offered for download, so I went ahead and gave it another try. This time I'm impressed! I haven't crashed it yet and I love some of its features.

It has tabbed browsing and good CSS support, and generally, all the things you expect from a modern browser. But wait, there's more! It's a Gecko-based browser ala Firefox. There's an extension available for converting Firefox extensions into Flock extensions so they can be used with the Flock browser. The abundance of extensions for Firefox is the feature that came closest to converting me to a full-time Firefox user, so this is a big plus in my eyes.

And there's still more! Flock integrates photos from Flick'r or Photobucket (see screenshot).

You can grab a photo from the photo bar to add to a blog post, comment of message via web email. You can have the photobar show your own photos, or your friends photos, and you can have Flock alert you when a friend posts new photos. You can also search Flick'r or Photobucket using keywords.

Flock has an integrated blog editor. I'm typing this post in it right now!

It supports most of the major blogging services and/or software, including Blogger, TypePad and WordPress. It has an editor window and a source window if you want to type in raw HTML, or just view the source from the editor.

One thing I like is that it has a toolbar for adding bold, italic and other styles as well as links and lists and HTML features. In Blogger's editor, none of those features work on Macs so you have to type all the HTML yourself. Flock's blog editor is definitely a step up in that case (unless you happen to like writing HTML). You can also save your posts before publishing, but they are saved to your local machine's hard drive, which is a bit inconvenient if you use more than one machine. Maybe eventually the saved/non-published drafts can be saved to your blog's server as a draft so you can access them no matter where you are.

One more nice feature that I haven't really checked out yet is Flock's snippet holder. You can drag text or pictures from a web page to the snippet icon in the lower right-hand corner of the browser window to save them. Then they are easily accessed for placing into blog posts, emails etc. It's kind of like the Mac's old Scrapbook desk accessory, remade for a web browser.

So the bottom line is, I'm seriously considering making Flock my default browser in place of Safari, which has been my main browser for the past couple of years. I haven't made the move yet, although I'm using it for various web tasks virtually everyday. I'll probably wait for an official version 1 before making the move as it still has it moments of obvious "beta-ness".

If you do much blogging or other internet "social" activities, you definitely ought to take Flock for a spin.

technorati tags:browsers, internet, blog, software

Blogged with Flock