In case you hadn’t heard, Flock, a "social web browser", is officially done as of April 26. Done as is no more new releases or support of it.
I’ve never quite understood the point of a social web browser, or any "enhanced" browser to begin with.
The first "enhanced" browsers I remember were from AOL and other ISPs. These were browsers that were all IE and stuffed full of crap. Usually boatloads of adware. There are probably more than a few of you out there that remember the bad old days of the AOL, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and other "optimized" web browsers. These bloat-extreme browsers do in fact still exist, but fortunately are far less in use these days.
Other than ISP-bloated browsers, the other type of "enhanced" before the introduction of the social browser were skin/feature add-ons like NeoPlanet and Maxthon. Compared to ISP-bloat, these were not adware-infested pieces of garbage but rather offered genuine enhancements to the browser experience. For example, the only way to get tabs in IE back before IE7 was to use something like Maxthon, so they did have their perks.
Then came the "social web browser". To the best of my knowledge, Flock was first and for a while the only browser billed as "social". What it did was simply integrate as many popular social media destinations on the internet as possible.
What I never understood about a social-designed browser is simply this: What’s the point when you can bookmark and/or use tabs and/or use extensions to do the same job, and usually do it better?
The only social media browser left (unless anyone knows another) is Rockmelt. I did actually install that browser and tried it out, but eh.. there’s nothing in it really I can’t do with plain tabs or extensions. Sure, it looks nice and all that, but it takes the lightning-fast Chromium and slows it down quite a bit just to ‘be social’.
No thanks.
Like what you read?
If so, please join over 28,000 people who receive our exclusive weekly newsletter and computer tips, and get FREE COPIES of 5 eBooks we created, as our gift to you for subscribing. Just enter your name and email below:
I used Flock for a while just for its Photobucket mass uploader which was waaaay better than the methods available at the time from the other browsers. They improved that part with their current Flash-based uploader which while not nearly as good as the Flock uploader, gets the job done quickly in a few clicks. Other than that, Flock disappeared from my system a few years ago.