(Apr. 23) My husband and I use different browsers; helps eliminate or reduce conflicts when one of us inadvertently downloads a virus and also allows us to maintain separate bookmarks or favorites. I use Firefox, he uses Netscape. We both use IE occasionally, but avoid it when accessing multimedia sites. Personally, I just don’t like the streamlined menu bar on the latest version because I sometimes need to use History or Stop. At least I remembered F5 is the refresh key.
But Netscape is retiring, sob sob (my first ever GUI browser and web page authoring tool) — and my husband received notice to switch to Firefox or Flock. We’ve never heard of Flock until then, but I got curious. I checked out the reviews, liked what I saw, and have been using it since.
I love it! Just days before I learned about Flock I was trying to create a web page that will have links to all my e-mail, blogs, and favorite news sites … something prettier than my Bloglines. So it’s great to have a browser like Flock where tabs and icons so I can view my Facebook, Flickr, e-mail, blog, and bookmarking sites with one click or one glance. There are also plug-ins so one can upload photos and videos or post blogs to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Photobucket, Picasa, Blogger, Typepad, WordPress, yes — Xanga, and a more.
Some of my favorite features: The media bar allows me to view the latest photos of my Flickr and Facebook contacts. I can bookmark/add my favorite pages to my computer as well as del.icio.us and/or ma.gnolia accounts. This is very useful because I use more than one computer. I can subscribe to news, blog, and comments feeds, then see everything in one page.
So if you’re a multi-tasker with short attention span like me, Flock might be the right browser for you. You will love how all the most common tasks on the Web are integrated like a one-stop shop. It doesn’t support chat, VOIP, and video conferencing yet but since I hardly use those it’s okay.
