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Well at the moment Katie and I are in the middle of redecorating the front room which used to be the office. We recently bought a new dinning room table while we were in Edinburgh over new years. Its an immense table looks gorgeous and so Katie and I have decided to paint, varnish and wallpaper the room so it looks awesome and when its finished it will look brill.
At the moment we have stripped the wallpaper and repainted the ceiling and painted the coving and the room looks well to be honest quite empty. I’ve had to go through all my old documents and draws and throwing a lot of stuff away, which has been quite cleansing. As part of the redecorating I’ve had to strip the PC away and use only the Mac. Having done this for a few days I’ve found Firefox(ff) is quite sluggish to run so I’ve been checking out Flock and Safari.
Safari, well I can’t quite remember what the time difference is but Apple quote it as fast and on the mac I agree its almost instant it load time compared to the 5-10 seconds it can take ff to load, as being the native browser would suggest it integrates perfect with OS X and all the lovely keychain-ness (or 1Password which I’ll really recommend you buy). I did have to tweak a couple of things namely setting the Status Bar to appear as I find not having anything at the bottom of screen worrying, as if the pages could quite easily slide off the browser and into the vents on the macbook. My biggest bugbear about it, is lack of plugins/addons call them what you will. The browser is presented as is, you can’t sync bookmarks with Firefox or anything else its just there, as I use a PC a work and a Mac a home some sort of sync capabilities would be brilliant and I’m sure I can’t be the only one to think so(hopefully there might be something in Snow Leopard). In a nutshell its a faster as is browser and it does its job incredibly well, because of this it has replaced firefox as my default browser.
However I like social media (sc), I think its great and can’t think of a browser that implements it any better than Flock. The sc aspect has been tightly integrated and I can see by using that a lot of thought has gone into the to making it seem part of the browser that an after thought. I like that Gmai,Delicious,Twitter,Facebook and Flickr all login at startup and I can see an overview of what my friends have been doing across all networks (similarly to what you see on the facebook homepage once you’re logged in). I like that you can easily share content with your friends by dragging stuff across to them in the sidebar, the same principle works for uploading photos to facebook/flickr/picasa. It also has a nice built in blogging tool (which I’m currently using to write this) which I like as it means I can have the browser open looking for content for posts without having loads of tabs open and swapping between them (some people may consider this a non-point as I could just login and keep it open in tab, well I don’t want to). Flock is based on Mozilla code so it has the Firefox feel but (once again) there is limited (and I mean really limited) addons available for it. The Firefox extensions don’t work grrrr and again no bookmark syncing! Also as it is based on ff there is lag at startup but no where near as bad as the fox takes to load. I find that Flock takes the aspects of mozilla and reworks for a browser that a lot of people would use if they only knew about. I like sc integration and tools and enjoy using it but I find the lack of add-ons annoying.
What would be great is if there was some sort of hybrid of both, because Safari’s blistering speed is let down by a lack of plugins and Flock’s fantastic social features suffer from a lag at start up. Which leaves me switching between both as the mood takes me. Mainly I’ll be using Safari (particularly while I’m at work and social media is blocked) but if I need to blog or share stuff then I’m using Flock. So if you are reading this Apple Developers (and I know that’s not really probable and also you’re probably in code freeze) please extend the features of Safari, I’ve seen you do it with iPhoto’09 so I’m hoping you’ve done something like this for Safari too.