Flock goes from strength to strength

Despite being another gecko based browser, there's something different about Flock. Features like mini toolbar, Media Streams, My World, Photo Uploader and Blog Post (which, as you probably guessed, I'm using to post this) feel more substantial than the average "add-on". The general browsing experience is good - as you'd expect from any Mozilla "flava", while the bugs are few and far between.

So it's great then. Wonderful. But is it as good as Firefox or Opera? Well, no. Firefox just rocks, thanks to being the biggest, meanest gecko on the block. If you want to be able to do something, chances are that there's a Firefox only add-on that will do it for you. You can harden Firefox up and tweak it just about as much as you could possibly need and there's the real sense of ownership you get when you take that basic Firefox shell and customize it to the hilt. On the other hand, Opera puts everything you could realistically need right at your fingertips without there being the slightest suggestion of clutter or claustrophobia (which is probably Flock's ultimate failing). Opera fills you with a warm glow and puts a serene smile on your face that makes passers-by think you've gone all weird and enlightened on them. So many Firefox add-ons are just trying to mimic something that The Big O does natively, while the IE7 extension suite IE7Pro tries desperately to turn IE into Opera - and pales in comparison (plus, they can't do anything about IE's continued instability and dismal CSS support).

It's an extremely pretty and useful browser: definitely better than Internet Explorer 7 (but let's face it, IE7 sucks something awful), possibly better than Seamonkey (but we like that one for it's plain, no-nonsense approach) but still not as good as Firefox or Opera. The great thing about browsers is that you can find a use for them all, and Flock has found it's niche in the area of photo account management and social browsing. I use it to keep tabs on my Photobucket and Flickr accounts and upload new photos there. Firefox is my general use browser and Opera is for mail and blogging (it has the best password wand in the business, so it's great for switching accounts).

Perhaps I should be comparing Flock to Maxthon... but I'll get to that browser in another post.

Blogged with Flock