Flock bills itself as the social browser for people who like to be connected; whatever that means. What it appears to mean is that browsers might become more specialized for specific groups of people.

From what I can see, Flock, though appearing to be a socialized browser, still acts like a general browser with more options. Flock is based on Mozilla’s Firefox browser rendering engine, so what you see on screen is likely to be the same as in Firefox.

Flock is a consumer Internet business which has developed a free, next generation web browser. The web, and the way people engage online, has evolved dramatically over the past decade. But web browsers - the application that fundamentally enables online experiences and services across ones’ connected life - have not kept pace.

By my count, the major web browsers have three rendering engines; WebKit, which is what Apple uses in Safari (also in OmniWeb and others); Mozilla, used in Firefox, Camino, Flock and others, and Opera, which is used by Opera.

After the basic web page rendering, all the browsers diverge rapidly to occupy their own space. Safari is lean and unobtrusive. Firefox is loaded with extensions. Camino is Mac-like. OmniWeb is feature laden.

Flock takes a youthful, social approach while dipping into the Fisher-Price school of design. It’s colorful, curvaceous, and cluttered, opposite the understated elegance of Safari. Flock lets users drag and drop photos and videos, text and URLs, and provides easy-to-use tools for access to Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, YouTube, and more.

When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular web sites.

The Flock photo uploader lets you upload hundreds of photos at a time to Flickr, FaceBook, Picasa, Photobucket, and other online photo sites. Bloggers will like the ability to use the Blog Editor to post entries to Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, Zanga, and LiveJournal.

Google’s Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are integrated (isn’t that the case with all browsers that open up Gmail and Yahoo! Mail?) in the browser and have their own buttons.

While Safari’s preferences are simple, Flock keeps in tune with Firefox and has preferences for everything, seemingly preferences for the preferences.

Flock is RSS savvy and parks RSS news feeds in the left sidebar so web pages are just a click away. The MyWorld button on the toolbar displays Widgets and buttons for FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, in addition to major RSS news feeds.

What? Your browser doesn’t have a People sidebar? You are soooo 2007.

When you log into a supported service the People sidebar will load all of your friends. Share with you friends by dragging and dropping photos, videos, feeds and text from the Media Minibar and web pages.

The sidebar also has buttons for Favorites, Accounts and Services, the drag-and-drop Web Clipboard to save clippings and photos. Oh, Accounts and Services lists all the online, well, uh, accounts and services you can register; from Blogger to Picasa to Twitter and sites in between.

Flock is aiming to create a community of users and supporters by tossing in to the browser experience every popular extension, add-on, and gimmick that might be used by plenty of people.

While Safari focuses on simplicity, ease-of-use, and high quality page rendering, Flock focuses on a stack of features for browser users who clearly love the busy life.

Granted, Flock is actually well organized, and considering how many different features are stuffed into the window, does not appear as cluttered as does Firefox when loaded with half a dozen extensions.

Not a bad deal for free, huh?

With so many browser choices available for Mac users these days, which one is best? The answer to that may be more simple than you think. There’s isn’t a best browser. In fact, I’m willing to guestimate that many Mac users actually use more than one browser (probably Safari and Firefox), and maybe more.

Flock is free, works on Macs, Windows PCs, and Linux PCs. It’s a much different experience than either Firefox or Safari, and far different than Camino.

So, the question of the day is, ‘Do you use more than one browser on your Mac? If so, which browsers and why more than one. OK, that’s more than one question. Share your perspective and experience in the Comments section below.

Check out the daily list of our 9 Word mini-Reviews at NoodleMac, and Kate's daily in-depth Mac software reviews at PixoBebo.

Off Topic #72 - Need to save a few dollars on Mac software? Click Here to save almost $10 on the new version of Photoshop Elements, and almost $20 on the new Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac from the Mac360 Store (it’s really Amazon). Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage and more-- barely $50 more than Apple’s iWork ‘08.

Off Topic #6 - The MacHeist is back. In case you missed it a few months ago, MacHeist is a great way for Mac users to get 12 top Mac applications and utilities for $49. Many of these have been reviewed on Mac360, so we highly recommend that you take a look. The value, what you get for what you pay, is remarkable. Click Here to look, buy, download.

• Article by Kate MacKenzie • Published on Thursday, April 17, 2008
• Category: Low End • 10 Reader comment(s) • Email This • Digg This • Shop Now

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Readers Talk Back:

GuyGene says:

Ig, me Pismo is indeed operated by pedals… but it gets me up the hills I need to climb. One thing I like to do - keep me money in me own account as long as I can, and being that the pedals do all I need them to do for me, which the Pismo does… nary a problem, except for a drive that failed, and recently failed RAM.

Anyway, it is not the Pismo that causes Safari to revert to something other than itself under the User Agent menu - it is something with Safari that does that…

Danny Boy, you’re not using a Pismo (PowerBook 2000 - 400 MHz or 500 MHz) are you?

I might give Flock another try… but it was definitely not as fast as OmniWeb, WebKit/Safari, etc. for me.

— Posted on Sun Apr 20 at 10:03 pm by GuyGene

Danny Boy says:

I have the same problem, but it doesn’t revert to Internet Explorer, instead going back to default. It seems to happen only on certain sites. Sometimes I browse for an hour with no change. Then, all at once, it’s gone back.

— Posted on Sun Apr 20 at 2:54 pm by Danny Boy

Jason 'jace' allen says:

You’re right. Flock is really quite good. Much easier to use than Firefox and feels more like Mac software. The social networking stuff doesn’t interest me, but I found the web email features to be far superior to Safari. My web host’s we email doesn’t work right under Safari but is perfect in Flock. The pages look good, and page loading speed is comparable. Nicely done. Hard to beat the price.

— Posted on Sun Apr 20 at 1:59 pm by Jason 'jace' allen

Mr Squid says:

Flock is not bad. It does what it says that will do, and it doe it very well. My problem with it is that I did not find the social networking tools to be much for useful than just going to he various Web sites and using them directly. Then again, I am not much of a social networker, so perhaps a hard-core networker will find Flock much more useful than I did.

— Posted on Sun Apr 20 at 1:10 pm by Mr Squid

Ken Wilson says:

I use WebKit with Developer. If I set the user agent to Safari sometimes it will revert back to ‘default’ instead, but what I don’t know is if it actually changed the user agent. It’s never reverted to MSIE. Ugh.

— Posted on Sun Apr 20 at 1:05 pm by Ken Wilson

iggy pence says:

OK, I set up Safari with Developer tools, selected Safari 3.1 as the default user agent and all is well.

There might be a difference between the actual user agent used by Safari vs. the setting. Maybe there’s a prefs somewhere that would show what’s really be used, unless you can go to a site to see what user agent it detects.

A Pismo? Those are pedal operated, right? Ancient. Maybe that’s part of the problem.

— Posted on Sun Apr 20 at 12:17 pm by iggy pence

GuyGene says:

P.S. I tried Flock, too slow on me old Pismo… deleted it already.

— Posted on Sun Apr 20 at 4:15 am by GuyGene

GuyGene says:

Ig, I think you are not understanding what I wrote - absolutely NOT, I haven’t have M$IE on my Mac since about ‘94 or so…

Do this:

1. make sure Developer is showing in the Safari menu - activate it in Preferences so it shows.

2. open Developer, then User Agent, and see what yours shows - it might be on Automatic, or probably MSIE 5.x.x. You do NOT need to have MSIE on your Mac; this feature is just to make a web site identify your browser as whatever you choose it to be.

3. select Safari under Developer/User Agent menu, go to some more sites, and let me know if your Safari will stay on itself (i.e., Safari, or whatever browser you chose), or revert back to MSIE at some point.

— Posted on Sun Apr 20 at 4:14 am by GuyGene

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