Reasons I Use Flock

November 4, 2006, 1:48 PM | 0 Comments

I’ve been a Firefox user for a while now and have been completely happy with Firefox as a browser ever since I switched from IE 6. Every now and then though, I’d find myself wishing for a little more in certain areas, especially when it came to Firefox’s RSS integration.

If you read my entry about RSS habits, you’ll remember that I decided to switch to Flock as my default browser based solely on the way it handles RSS feeds, but there are several other features of this browser that make it very nice to use.

So, if you haven’t heard of Flock, I’d suggest you take a look at it and give it a try. Here are some reasons why I made the switch from Firefox to Flock in the summer and haven’t even thought of turning back.

• Flock has a nice clean interface that reminds me a little bit of Camino on OS X. It’s clean, fairly simple and it looks much better than the default Firefox theme (both versions 1.x and 2).
• It’s Firefox on steroids… really. Flock is built on Firefox so it has all of Firefox’s features but also includes so many more that are either available to Firefox as extensions or aren’t available at all. Having a lot of extensions tends to increase the memory usage of Firefox by quite a bit, but Flock has the advantage of having these features compiled into the application itself.
• Flock supports the majority of Firefox’s extensions and will automatically import them (if I remember correctly) when you install. Some extensions require a few tweaks to work properly with Flock, so they won’t be imported and you’ll have to download them from Flock’s extension site.
• Flock touts itself as the “social web browser” because it includes several features that let you use your social networking tools easier. Flock supports both Flickr and Photobucket for photo sharing and del.icio.us for shared bookmarks as well. It also includes a very good uploading utility that allows you to add tags, descriptions, titles and even lets you add your photos to a new or existing photo set.
• One of the simplest features of Flock is also one of my favourites. It’s called “Web Snippets” and basically allows you to select anything on a page and drag it to the bottom of the browser to save for future use. Once you’re in the right area, the snippets bar appears allowing you to drop your new snippet onto it.
• As I mentioned above, Flock has very good RSS integration and if it lacked any (or all) of the other features that I described above, I’d still use Flock just for that reason. Based on my personal usage I’d have to say that Flock’s RSS support is even better than that of Safari, which set the standard for RSS integration in a browser. Not only does Flock keep track of which items you’ve viewed, but it also allows you to save articles for future use.

Overall Flock is a very good product, and it hasn’t even made it to version 1.0 yet. At time of this writing, Flock is at version 0.7.7 which makes me very optimistic about the future of this great browser. As with any application though, there are always things that can be improved upon. Flock’s bookmark/favourite management isn’t that great and I wish they’d just stuck with the Firefox bookmark management instead of trying to put a new spin on things.

Also, even though they’ve improved upon it a little bit over the past few releases, Flock is still a memory hog compared to most browsers. When you take into account the additional features that Flock has built in, it’s understandable that it would take more memory but they should be able to cut down on that a little bit more. I have a fairly decent amount of RAM in my computers though, so I’m not too worried about it at this point.

If you’re a Windows user, Flock offers one of the better ways to get your photos on Flickr. If you’re a Mac user, you’re probably using an iPhoto extension to get your photos to Flickr (which is a much better option as it saves your captions from iPhoto automatically), so Flock’s Flickr integration wouldn’t be that much if a draw. Having said that, some of the other features that Flock offers make it a very good option even for OS X users.

So if you haven’t already, give Flock a try… you might just like it!

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