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Why you should use Mozilla Flock

Written by Marco Conti Monday, 08 December 2008 11:50

Flock is a browser based on Mozilla Firefox and it's geared toward Blogging and Social Networking. If you are a social networking butterfly or you use Wordpress for your blog, Flock it's a "must have". But Flock is incredibly useful for Web developers as well.

There are several reasons for that:

01Flock is based on Firefox 3.x and therefore it gives us developers another instance of Firefox for all those add-ons we would like to have activated but can't because they slow down the browser. Every add-on built for Firefox will work on Flock without a hitch, including my favorites: Roboform, Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug.

02Flock integrates beautifully with Gmail. In fact, I am just starting the integration of Gmail IMAP, Flock and Thunderbird and already I feel like I have the best of both worlds: Flock to log in and use Gmail as a webmail platform and Thunderbird to view and manage the same email account in real time but in a more traditional, folder based way. All the power of Gmail without the mind bending calisthenic of the "Conversation" system, which I have never totally gotten used to but is certainly useful in some situations.

03Flock is obviously great for keeping up with your social networks, which for us developers means business and connections. Flock makes it a piece of cake to have your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. always open and ready to go.

04Flock is pretty to look at and makes working with Wordpress much easier. I can't wait for them to include Joomla among their supported programs so that I can write my Joomla articles from the Flock editing window instead of using the inline editor. While I am comfortable enough with the Joomla writing pane and I use JCE, which is hands down the most powerful inline editor I have ever used, I wouldn't mind having an alternative and I am sure some of my clients would feel much more at home with it.

Flock is great for keeping up with your social networks, which for us developers means business and connections.

Let's look at ways you could use Flock for SEO as an example. There are many really nice SEO add-ons for Firefox. Unfortunately, they tend to be pretty intrusive and some of them go as far as rewriting the code of the sites you visit. Naturally, that won;t work very well: am I editing my own code or the add-on's? I moved my SEO add-ons from Firefox to Flock and now I have essentially an SEO platform I can use to optimize my sites without hindering my web development efforts.

Come to think of it, Mozilla also offers another great little browser I haven't used in a while: SeaMonkey. I think as soon as I have some time I will install it again and see if the same applies to SeaMonkey. That would give me an additional platform to use for those useful add-ons. Stay tuned for more news on that issue.

There are many advantages in using Flock and I think every web developer/designer should consider adding it to their bag of tricks.

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