Flock: My new favorite browser!

If you have been using internet in any way or the other in the last three years, you must have been noticing the revival of internet browsers, and the new competitivity taking place now. I myself must have been using at least 9 or 10 different browsers (productively, that means I have been regularly using them for education or private purposes, later also professionally). Of course not all at the same time. Before the times of firefox, I was an absolutely convinced fan of Mozilla, although I was stilusing textbased Mail clients on my Sun X-Terminal machine :D (so much for the integrated mail client, that's why I switched to firefox immediately, it was lighter, quicker and customizeable...).

Those were good times, and I must say I have never been a fan of Internet Explorer, it just simply always annoyed me. But I did that as I was a teenie and wanted to chat with friends all over the world, there was no other solution, at least that I knew of.

So this is to say that the new pluralism in internet browsers landscape is utterly refreshing. I have currently 4 different browsers on my machine, and believe me I kept busy trying to keep that minimal:

1. Mozilla Firefox (my absolute favorite, no question about that)


2. TheWorld browser (very good looking, functional, rapid browser using the IE6 Engine. It comes from China, I'm looking forward to see what the chinese got at stake for us!)


3. Safari (It looks great, works well, but lacks plug-ins and very important functionalities for me like mlti-line tabbed browsing and session management, without which I can't live)


4. IE6 (I never use this thing, apart from when an application only works correctly with IE6...don't ask me to update to IE7...)

So the only two I practically use are Firefox for professional purposes (everything that has to do with my work and my PhD) and TheWorld for personal use (send emails, write on my blog, listen to internet radios, and other personal surfing stuf). I need this separation for at least two good reasons:

1. The performance of my professional (I mean for professional purposes) surfing doesn't suffer from my personal one.
   


2. I can separate between the complexity of managing many tabs for each purpose (I can have up to 200 open tabs on Firefox sometimes, of which the performance each time astonishes me, although it eats almost all my RAM :D)

But now I guess I'll change my ride from TheWorld to Flock (see the screenshot I have made on my personal machine)! Flock allows me to manage all my web 2.0 and social surfing activities on one interface. I have noticed that I spend most of my private surfing time not only on reading news and learning more about religion, history, politics and science, but on social bookmarking sites, reading blogs and entries about all possile topics that are of interest to me. Social surfing plug-ins made my firefox slow and didn't go well along with my intended use of it.

On Flock I can:

1. Manage my Blogging acounts and edit entries and articles on my browser without using the blogging website's interface (Blogger, Blogsome, WordPress etc.)


2. I can watch videos on my computer or circulating on the web (media bar)


3. manage my accounts on social websites (such as facebook, twitter, youtube, flickr) and get notified as soon as there is any changes,


4. I manage all my RSS feeds (another entry about that at a later time, I want to talk about GreatNews)


5. I can upload and manage my photos on social Photo websites such as Photobucket


6. manage my social bookmarks on delicious, Digg or Magnolia


7. Centrally manage all my accounts and subscription to services


8. I also use it as a central management console for all my bookmarks from TheWorld and Firefox, and from social bookmarking websites

Now the best is, all I said doesn't come from the website's help nor is it any copy paste, it is simply what I can see on the interface when I start Flock. I am in love, this browser is great, I am expecting great times with it! Hope you'll enjoy it!

Marwane El Kharbili