Bull3t’s Blog

Flock, the web browser that I originally thought imitated Mozilla Firefox to add new features such as uploading pictures to photo sites, advanced feed subscription, blog integration and safer searching has recently been updated. Flock is still in it's early stages, nevertheless, version 0.9 has been released to the general public and people are now beginning to see why it is called "the social web browser", take a look at some of these new features which point out just why so many people are using it as a social networking web browser:

• Receive updates when friends have new photos, videos or blog posts.
• Upload up to 1,000 photos at one time to popular photo sites.
• Drag and drop photos and videos from Flock's Media Minibar to email, comment fields, blogs, etc.
• Collect your favorite photos, videos, and text from the web and blog them instantly.
• Flock Dashboard, called "My World" is now live, supporting many social networking services, enabling you to access them all from one page and post to them respectively.

The newer version enables Flock to be used as a social networking application inclusive of a web browser which just happens to be the center of attention. I personally do not like the new version, mainly because it takes a good 10-20 seconds to load on my computer and, in my opinion the graphical user interface is a mess. Here are the main reasons as to why I shall be reverting back to Mozilla Firefox as my default web browser:

• The graphical user interface is a complete mess and the theme doesn't help the situation much either.
• I do not use social networking services enough to put Flock to good use.
• It takes too long to startup, loading mostly the things that I will not put to use.
• One of it's main features is a feed subscription service, but I feel that I will not use it as I do not subscribe to feeds.
• It still has many bugs that have not yet been addressed.

Why Flock has a blog posting feature I do not know; you are in a browser so you may aswell navigate to your blog and use the built in editor for your blogging platform instead of risking losing data through the Flock Blog Editor (which I am weary of, as posts I sent through the Blog Editor in version 0.7 were changed before they were actually published to my blog and messed up the layout completely).

Some of the features actually sound quite good and I would love to try them out, but I do not wish to go to all the trouble of loading up a social networking application for just the web browser and a Flickr photo uploader, it just doesn't seem worthwhile, I may aswell use a safer, simpler and easier to use web browser instead. That is why I am now going to start using Mozilla Firefox once more.