For instance if you login to your Flickr, Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, or Twitter account it will ask you if you want to integrate that account into the browser. For the photo and video sharing sites (i.e. flickr, Facebook, & YouTube) the browser has a media bar built in to navigate through the pictures and videos. There is also a person sidebar built in that will display your friend’s updates to twitter, facebook, flickr, and YouTube. de.licio.us bookmarking is also built into the browser so that you can save your bookmarks to the browser and to the de.licio.us web site at the same time.

If you are a blogger then you can take advantage of the blogging feature which brings up a window with an editor similar to what most blogging sites use. You can type in text in the editor section (basic WYSIWYG), fix up your html in the source section, and see what it will look like in the preview section. It also allows editing previous posts making for a quicker experience in getting your job done.

And if you are worried about leaving your favorite Firefox extensions behind you are in luck because most of them will work in Flock.

Overall it is a great browser and I can see there is potential for it to grow. I have switched over fairly successfully in the past few days. It imported all of my cookies, bookmarks, and passwords that I had saved in Firefox though I don’t think that the people sidebar it quite up to snuff when it comes to twitter, as It had a hard time keeping up with tweetr.

Blogged with Flock

After using Safari for a day, well not quite a day because it was hard to use it exclusively, I have found some pros and cons.

The first pro is that it seemed to render faster, i.e. the Digg page that announced the product to digg’s users and has over 8300 diggs and 1134 comments at the time of this writing (a recipe for a very big web page). It also has a very slick looking interface, my history carried over from firefox after install, and more real-estate for the web page.

My main con would be that Safari doesn’t implement add-ons yet (I must have ad-block, greasemonkey, de.licio.us, and over a dozen other extensions in firefox). This could be coming in the future as Apple’s webkit is going open source (the engine underlying Safari). I also was missing Firefox’s “spell check this field” feature which I use regularly in forums, comments, twitters, blog posts, digg submissions, and anywhere else I am placing my words on the web.

So yes I’ll use Safari, but as it stands it won’t be for much more that debugging websites and trying to render large websites (by the way, digg when are you going to page out your comments?). As it stands that is how I use IE, unless I’m watching movies in Netflix’s “Watch now” or MLB.tv which don’t support Firefox yet (I’m running vista so don’t correct me about MLB).

I’m wondering when we’ll see the release of the firefox add-ons “open this page in Safari” and “Safari Tab” (Damn I shouldn’t of said anything, I could have finally found my first Firefox add-on)

I can see why Apple is trying to make this move, they are trying to put yet another application on the desktops of the Widows iPod users (rumor has it that it will eventually be bundled w/ iTunes and quicktime) to help coerce then into buying a Apple computer once they become familiar with their products but why haven’t they incorporated more into the browser. Right now it seems like Firefox lite, which is what Apple seems to do best, they seem to always take the minimalist approach which may hurt or help them in this market. Most of the users I know that have gave up IE on Widows only did so because Firefox gave them more thus leading IE to incorporate more to win back some users. The users I know that still use IE only do so because it is familiar and came with their system. So Safari’s only chance in its current state is to appeal to the minimalist user who uses iTunes and the developers who will use webkit to develop what I hope to a long list of Add-ons to rival Firefox and make it a better browser, it still has a long way to go.