Buchin just told me about this browser engine this morning. Flock; the best and friendly web browser for those who are active on the Internet community and activity.

And here, I’ll give a mini-review for this web browser.

It designed with a lot of features embeded, such as:

1. Blogtools (Blogger, WordPress, etc)
2. Image Sharing (Photobucket and Flickr)
3. Search Engine Toolbar (Google, Yahoo, Amazon, even Wikipedia, and more)
4. Better layout for RSS & feed template, etc.

You can find them on its toolbar, and really taking advantage from those features; and they’re costumizable (of course).

From Tools -> Account and Service menu, there are some tabs you will see.

These are few major things that I’d like to write about.

1. Blogtools Facility.

For you who love blogging, this is the facility that Flock offered, which is might be useful for you.

Start with entering your Blog’s URL, Flock will auto detect what type of service you use for it (I’m using Wordpress). And you will need to enter login name and password. That’s it, you’re all set for an account setup.

By pressing CTRL + B will retrieve the panel for Blog service. Just like what you normally do in the login panel of your blog service when you’re going to add a new post. Click “publish” when you’re done.

Here’s the good part, where you can chose in which category(s) you want to put your post into. One thing that tickling me is that Tag service. Wordpress doesn’t have TAG option by default (except with plug-in).

Cons:

1. You can’t upload picture into your host, and attached it to your post. (Unless you’re mixing from Photobucket).
2. No auto-thumbnail.
3. The tag is linked out to Technorati, instead of our own database.
4. You can’t manage (edit or delete) your posts, lol.

Conclusion:

This tool is pretty much useless for me since I need to use all of the fatures from WP. But for those who have a simple diary / report blog site, it’s good enough for them.

2. Photo Service

This is the coolest feature from Flock.

By using Photo Services from Flock, you will able to signed yourself in to your Photo Sharing Service (I’m using Photobucket), and launch your gallery’s thumbnails on your toolbars. You can also Drag and Drop the thumbnail everywhere, to get the TAG CODE whether for the thumbnail, full size, or BBC code (usually for Forum).

And you could uploading images to your photobucket account, by clicking “Uploader” button.

You can upload multiple files at once! You can have your own little studio to adjusting the images that you’re going to upload, and also put the Name and Description as usual.

3. Search Engine Bar

This is the good one. You can set what is the default search engine you want to use, and it also has a pop up to show the top results while you’re typing. You can also use another services, even e-bay and Wikipedia.

Cons:

1. The top results only work with Yahoo!
2. No good results to get Britney’s cell number.

4. Extras

This is exciting. There are plenty of plugins and extras for Flock.
http://extensions.flock.com/extensions

Take a look yourself, and find many good things in there =D.

Overall it’s a great web-browser, since it’s based from FireFox system. It’s compatible with almost all websites, secure, fast, and cute (those new icons). Also, with those new embeded features, make this browser being one of the best browsers ever; however, I still find some issues that quite bothering me:

1. The “Find” facility (CTRL+F) cannot search the text inside text-area.
2. I can’t move the Tabs bar from top to the bottom (Opera).
3. There’s no “Reload Image” option, when right clickin on an image (Opera).

Just those three for now, even I can’t say I’m completely satisfied, it’s still become my default browser now. Go get your Flock, and give a try ;-)

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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