Firefox finally finds an equal.

Flock may have kicked its daddy off the top of the browser food chain.
by AC - permalink

I finally decided to give Flock a try after the release of version 0.7.11. Not because it was a particularly important release, just because I've tried everything else and nothing has really even come close to supplanting Firefox for me. Opera is very good, and getting better. But I've been spoiled by Firefox's extensibility, and the "killer-app" extension is AdBlock. Avant Browser, the best of the IE-based browsers, has native ad blocking, but is not as customizable overall, and still runs on IE's rendering engine. SeaMonkey and Netscape can use ad blocking extensions, but SeaMonkey is unwieldy and Netscape is a cluttered UI nightmare. K-Meleon is under-developed and relatively primitive compared to Firefox.

That pretty much just leaves Flock, which is currently based on Firefox 1.5. And to cut to the end of the story, it's become my default browser. It's as exstensible as Firefox, though with fewer certified extensions. But it has AdBlock, Download Manager Plus, All-in-One Sidebar, and a few others that I like. It looks great, has a ton of really nice included features, is highly customizable, doesn't eat up too much RAM, and it's well-supported. The search bar is limited to Yahoo!, but is feature-rich, fast, and surprisingly useful. I love the integrated blogging tools, and it seamlessly imported all of my history, passwords, bookmarks, etc. from Firefox. Startup time is slightly behind Firefox, but the installer package is a little above middle-of-the-pack (Flock's installer is 9MB vs. Firefox's 5.7MB, Opera's 6.2MB, Netscape's 18.3MB, and Avant Browser's 1.8MB). Flock also has a more than competent RSS viewer that equals the Sage extension I've been using in Firefox for quite a while now.

At first, I used Flock a few times, falling back to Firefox as my default browser, as I've used Opera or Netscape or whatever in the past. But eventually I realized that there was nothing I needed Firefox for that I hadn't been able to do with Flock. And not being hip to all the under-the-hood engineering differences between Firefox 2 and Flock 0.7, I decided that Flock might as well be my default choice.

So there you go. In my experience, Flock is basically Firefox 1.5 plus a bunch of social-network-type integrations like blogging, picture sharing, etc., with all of the same features and with almost equal extensibility, support, and customization. From and end-user perspective, it's an unqualified success.