Flock - 2.0

While I still do most of my general browsing in Safari (clean, fast, simple, elegant) I usually keep Flock open in the background. Why? Because—as another reviewer already mentioned—it is excellent at doing what it's meant to. Its integration with so many social sites (facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, and more...) is unsurpassed. Itsintegration with Yahoo Mail and Gmail is great—though I prefer to check my Gmail using Apple's Mail. throw in the PicLens extension for mozilla-based browsers (it says for Firefox but works in Flock as well) and you have a social media (read "friends' pics posted online anywhere) powerhouse. I also love the built in blogging tool—while I really need to use it more, I love the fact that despite being free it works smoothly and uniformly with no less than 6 of the most popular free blogging sites. Is it perfect? No, but no one browser truly is. I'd like to see better integration with other software, especially iLife apps, iCal, Mail, and Address Book. I don't want to replace these with an all-in-one,I just want to be able to access their data as needed sometimes w/o opening or switching to them. I guess I'd also like the blogging tool to be turned into a full journal, but a) I suspect that I'd be better served with a separate app for that and b) I only really want this from Flock because it's posting mechanism works so well across all those blogging sites. If only one of the free journal apps could do that....

To everyone dissing this browser, I've been using it (various beta versions of it) for well over a year, and I love it. The Flock development team are building a great product. It already does most of the things that Ancient_Boii_Tribe is asking for in his ideal browser (so it seems obvious he hasn't really given it a fair chance).. id/passwords, and you can even install most FireFox plugins (because it's built on the FireFox engine).

For <i>objective</i> users who might read this, I'd like to point out that there are loads of users (on both Mac and PC) who love this app, and wouldn't want to do without it. So don't believe all the trash-talk this is getting here at VT.

Sure I've had issues with various builds of Flock (that's what betas are all about, figuring out the problems), but I've always been able to find a version that's stable and works well. Support and documentation are great, through the Flock user/developer forums.

New type of web browsers is right. It's very complex but looks good. This would have to be really stable and fast, before I would sink the time into learning it.

Right now it's painfully slow. The slowest browser I have. I was trying to look at pics on Flickr.com. It needs Safari speed, Safari use of the USPS Click-n-ship label printing for ebay. It should remember user ID's and passwords like FireFox, download youtube videos like FireFox's plugin downloadhelper. Make the UI easier to understand.

Then just maybe I might put the time in to learn this "new type of web browser"

I rally haven't found one that does what I need. It seems like each browser has a piece of what could be the best browser.

I wish Flock could do that. A browser can never be fast enough, and I hate retyping passwords.
I like to download videos. I like to print shipping labels for ebay using Click-n-ship on USPS.com

That's my wish list. Oh yeah, and spell check.

But the dweebs at Flock have managed to completely screw up a Firefox port by loading it with useless pork features and bloatscripts so that it is unreliable and the Sloooooooowest browser (both Mac and PC) around! It's EVEN worse than iCab (iCrap) and Opera. Stay away from this garbage browser, it's too frustrating to use and it just gobbles up but HD space and system resources when running (till it crashes - tested on 10 different Macs with 10.3.x thru 10.5.x)

If you want a very fast browser go Camino, if you want a great browser that you can customize go Firefox .... Safari?, go straight to the garbage can with Flock.

Lock up when trying to load. Have to do a force quit.