Flock

The open source browser built up from the Mozilla engine is commendably robust and fast. With social networking features built into the browser its an interesting mix.

The browser which has not evolved much from its initial state is undergoing some serious makeover with the social networking integration on flock.

One feature that is quite interesting is the photo upload feature which lets you upload photos to Flickr or Photobucket directly from the browser. Setting it up is an easy deal. But you need a Flickr or Photobucket account. Similar plug ins are available on other browsers too but this comes with the browser.

Blogging as you browse , the best of the lot. Once you set up your account you can directly blog what you encounter on the blog. This can be pictures , selected text and almost any thing that you see on the blog.

My News is a very good tool similar to Google reader but here it is built into the browser. You can add feeds or pages to this. You can directly browse these and mark them as read or save them. Better yet you can directly blog it.

Yahoo web search is built into the browser. The interesting part is you can select a given text and then use it as a search string. This is quiet useful. The same feature is available on Google tool bar or yahoo tool bar but again this come by default.

The photo bar is a great way to browse photos from Filkr. It shows a list of photos taken from Flickr public listing or you could log in and then see and manage your photos. You have an option of two image sizes on this list and also a built in search. When browsing on Photobucket or FLickr taking the mouse over another users photo will display, that users photos on the photo bar.

Built-in full-text search using Clucene. Search as you type for pages in the cache. This is quite useful and innovative.

It also has integrated spell Check capabilities.

Installing the Me.dium plug in enables you to share and also see what your friends are browsing in real time. This is an interesting tool. You can choose not to share what you don't want to share too. The background sharing feature makes this automatic, this is very handy.You can also communicate with friends on Me.dium.

The Note tool is very useful you can store things that you find interesting for later use just by dragging to this tool at the bottom of the screen.

You can also share your favorites with other users or share it between multiple computers.

This browser is a great mix of inbuilt tools that otherwise need different plug ins built directly into the core browser.

For the advanced User :-

The foot print of the program is relatively low and can be run on relatively low end machines.

You can batch upload photos to Flickr etc very easily with Flock.

Tab browsing is there by default.

You can use photos on the Photo bar directly into online document editors.

The engine is basically Mozilla with a few tweaks here and there.

There is a built in Javascript console that can be useful for developers.

With all these tools the packages is less than 10 MB in size.

The page info tool gives a lot of information about the page you are currently on.


Negatives:-

The interface needs a lot of guessing to work on.

Most features are not well documented.

You have to play around to discover many of the new features.

Serious lack of theme availability.

The browsers core engine could have been made a little more configurable.

The yahoo search integration could have been switched over to Google as it is clearly the leader in search.

More social news site should be supported.