Fire Fox : reliable one
Any browser that was to successfully challenge IE6’s market dominance would have to be far and away the best browser on offer. The Mozilla suite, on which Navigator 6 was based, is excellent but aimed at developers and unwieldy for most user’s needs. The web needed a browser that was fast, lightweight, and did everything IE does, but better. That browser is Firefox.
It is the safest browser available, as it doesn’t contain many of the more obvious vulnerabilities that IE has, such as ActiveX components . Firefox is still under very active development by a huge community of volunteer coders, many of whom worked at Netscape in its heyday. If a vulnerability is found, it is corrected and an update made available in days, sometimes hours. This means Firefox cannot fall into the same trap that IE did — receiving no updates for years and having its various security holes get exploited by thousands of hackers and virus writers.
All that is obviously really great, but the things that you’ll notice first about Firefox are features like » tabbed browsing which reduces your desktop clutter by keeping all of your open webpages within one Firefox window. Firefox was also the first browser to offer popup blocking by default.
Internet Explorer 7 : for microsoft addicts
After a long hiatus after Internet Explorer 6 was released, Microsoft finally got shunted out of complacence in the browser market by the threat posed by new upstart browsers like Firefox and Safari. IE7 is a great improvement over its predecessor, with much improved standards support. It has also caught up on the other browsers in terms of features like tabbed browsing and intelligent popup blocking. Firefox is still my favourite browser, but IE7 ain’t half bad.
Flock : for bloggers and photo uploaders a.ka. my type of browser
The latest version of Flock launched last week and I thought I’d give it a whirl. I heard the developers discussing the photo uploader on the TalkCrunch podcast and it sounded interesting so I have been playing with that particularly (see screenshot below).
The Flock photo uploader is fantastic! There’s no other word for it. It is simplicity itself – drag an image to the photo topbar and the uploader opens ready to upload the image.
I was previously using a plugin for iPhoto to upload my images to my Flickr account but it was very clunky. It frequently hung in the middle of image uploading and there was no way to associate photos with a Flickr set. That had to be done manually after uploading. This is all a thing of the past thanks to the Flock uploader.
As well as uploading to Flickr the Flock uploader allows you to upload to PhotoBucket. Now if only they’d implement uploading to Zooomr, I’d be able to upload to my Zoomr account from within Flock as well!
Thanks for the kind words about Flock! We’ve got quite a few exciting innovations planned for the coming months, so keep your eyes peeled. Zooomr integration is not currently on the roadmap, but we do keep track of which services are hot/requested. I will add your vote to the Zooomr pile.
Flock on!
Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com