LonnieOlson

Quite a bit has changed in Flock since I last tried it out. They now have a Public Beta, a good number of extensions available, and an even more cohesive almalgamation of features.

I have been switching between browsers a lot lately. I switched from Camino to Firefox a few days ago when I heard that Google Browser Sync came out. Google’s Browser Sync is pretty nice for those that use multiple computers, but not simultaneously. Now I got the taste for trying Flock again, so here we go again with another switch.

Switching to Flock

Flock was able to import all my data (bookmarks, cookies, saved passwords, etc) from either Firefox or Safari. It worked just fine. Flock also has a little wizard to setup some of the cool features. The wizard was happy to take my del.icio.us and wordpress logins, setup searching, blogging, favorites very simply. This setup doesn’t import your OPML of RSS feeds, but that was done later. It took a little bit of searching to find it, but until I opened my mind and stopped looking in the “common” places, and started to look in the “obvious” places, it was easily found under the Add Feed button.

Browser Breakdown

Here is a breakdown of my thoughts and opinions on different browser choices for the Mac. These are in order of preference so far.

Flock

• Builtin features for favorites sharing, blogging, RSS reader, etc
• Extensible as Firefox, and repository is growing
• Not quite so slim and fast
• Slick Mac like interface

Camino

• OS integration
• Mac like interface
• Slim and built for speed
• Extensible, but not very easy
• No RSS reader at all (Vienna is a great stand-alone reader)

Firefox

• Terrible RSS reader
• Extremely extensible (can add features similar to Flock even)
• Not so slim, but very usable
• Available on every OS
  

Safari

• Not open-source.
• Comparatively fast
• Pretty good RSS reader
• Good integration with OS (keychain, etc)
• Not very extendable
• Slick interface