I’ve been testing the Spawn of FireFox called “Flock“. Flock is basically Firefox dressed up for Social Media sites. if your the type of person who loves sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and others then this may be your dream browser! It is these types of sites that this browser is made for… This is not to say it is its only use though.

Flock has some nice features for bloggers. It has a cool feature-full writer for all the top blogging platforms. I never liked it much though, it just was not what i am used to. It would be great for people who use Blogger… But for wordpress users it will not offer everything you need. If you like me you have some plugins and some of these plugins might change a few things on the fly, of course this writer has none of things.

It does have some nice sharing features for sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. It also has a nice way of integrating the browser with Social sites, you can simply drag any content like a whole web-page or photo into a sidebar which has all your friends. It will then send the content to them and hopefuly they will check it out. Features like this is what really sets it apart from Firefox. It has a cool top menu which is great for quickly checking mail, RSS feeds, and your friends.

One feature that looks really cool is how you can search for media. This tool searches sites like Google and youtube for Videos and images. It then displays them in a nice top menu with imasges and other info.

The only thing I really use is Twitter and RSS feeds. The RSS reader is great, it is one of the only real features I used. I found the email checker a bit frustrating to use though

Flock also gives you your own home page. This homepage is hosted on your computer. It grabs your feeds and other content and displays it as a sort of MSN/AOL/iGoogle type page and gives you everything you need in one easy to use page.

Conclusion

Flock is simple not a browser that is built for me. It is made for the Facebook generation who love to share things and spend a lot of time chatting. For me I would only really use Twitter which I can find a better plug-in for FireFox ( TwitterFox).

Like twitter most of the features can be found in Plug-ins for FireFox. The only real selling point is the way Flock displays these plug-ins. It also has a nice Homepage which was nice to use… But it is not really anything you cant get for free from Google or Yahoo!.

For me I think I’ll stick with FireFox and Chrome. Maybe when I get all hip and start using all the social media sites that come and die I will switch… But don’t expect this for sometime

We all know about the likes of FireFox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari and now Chrome, but did you know there are a lot more browsers out there worth a look?

Well I have decided to take a look into the browser world and see if I can find some gems that most normal users might not know about.

I decided to stay away from the normal alternative browser like:

Flock (Social version of FireFox. i.e. MySpace, facebook, Twitter, Bebo)
Safari (Mac browser ported)
FireFox PortableOpera Portable
Internet Explorer Standalone
SeaMonkey
Netscape

I may do some reviews for these at a later date. if I do I shall update this with links

I just thought that these are big names and there are hundreds of reviews for them anyway. I

may in the future do some reviews for PDA Browsers as I have one and found it a pain to find a good one (I did stick with Opera for anyone wondering).

Note: All browsers will be for WindowsXP (I can not say for sure that they work for Vista as I do not use it)

All the browsers I review I have tested and are the latest versions on offer. The date they are tested are from: 15th September 2008 - 20th September 2008/ I thought it would be a good idea to state the date as versions change so quickly and this will be outdated very quickly.

GreenBrowser Review

Version tested: 4.7.0902Website

Website info: GreenBrowser is free to download and use. If you think our software are good! It’s welcome for you to donate. We will provide best support for donative user and make the software better! Thanks for your support!

This is a very full featured browser. It has many plug-ins that I might use with FireFox already built in and ready to use.

One feature I really liked that came with it was the adkiller and easy use of stopping Images and scripts already built in.

It has a FireFox feel to it, but from my personal use I found it slower at rendering web-pages.

This browser just had a feeling that it has too many options and overpowers the average user. It has so many plug-ins already pre-installed that it took me a few hours to just use them all and find out what some actually do.

I also found some annoying things with this browser. It has a floating button that will be displayed when you start GreenBrowser. You can move it anywhere you want but it will always be on top of whatever you have running. As soon as you click this the browser will popup for you to use.
This I do think would be very handy for web designers who wish to test new code and refresh without trying to find the browser.
For the average user this would be on no use… I think it should have been a option that had to be selected on install as it is very annoying until it is turned off.

My Score: 5/10

K-Meleon Review

Version tested 1.5.0 (2008-08-08)
Website

Website info:
K-Meleon is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser for the Win32 (Windows) platform based on the Gecko layout engine (the rendering engine ofMozilla). K-Meleon is free, open source software released under the GNU General Public License.

K-Meleon is on hell of a fast browser. It loads almost instantly upon opening it. K-Meleon offers most of the basic browser features you would expect from a big browser, it also has a few that you would normaly download as plug-ins pre-installed.

The big selling point for this browser is how fast it loads. There is even a symbiotic loader to further reduce start time for older, slower PCs.

It also supports macros so you can set it up to do a whole range of things that normally could take awhile to do. It comes with many common macros already to use.

Downsides… I cant really think of any downsides to this browser. It has no real annoyances. The only thing I would say was a bit annoying was it has no “Open all in tabs” button in the bookmarks. If it has this then it would be a perfect Entrecard browser. I am sure that this could be fixed in macros and could be a powerful tool for this type of use.

My Score: 7/10

(High score mainly for fast loading times) Read more »