hooray!

sometimes i wonder...

i'll be with near someone who's looking for something online, and they put in the strangest searches. if they're the type to accept my help i'll pitch in  by suggesting search terms. i've been searching so long that if i know what i'm looking for it usually only takes me 1 try. every once in a while though, i'll get stumped.

recently i'd been a little mix of sad and angry. a web browser i'd come to love, Flock, changed drastically...for the worse. i am glad to say that i am not alone on this one.

anyway, i'll start off with what i like about Flock. Flock is based on Firefox, but you can think of it as a sort of a customized Firefox with social networking in mind. The idea is that you store/consolidate accounts from different popular websites and then they kind of become features of the browser. So for example, i have a photobucket account and a blogger (blogspot) account. i store my accounts and i can now use flock upload to photobucket without having to go to the photobucket website. i'm currently writing this blog from just going to the file menu and selecting "new blog". i don't know, it just seems nice to be able to blog so easily. it skips quite a few steps than when writing a blog by going to blogspot.

anyway, i started off with a beta version of flock. it essentially had the same feel as firefox but with some extra features that came in handy. so...what happened? well first off they changed the look. the new browser has all sorts of strange buttons that are supposed to be appealing, but instead are kind of confusing. they are also kind of bulky. next,  some features seemed to have disappeared altogether. suddenly dragging and dropping a photo into a blog was not as easy as it used to be. so to be quick and sum this up, the older beta version had easier to use features and looked nicer. the newer version had strange changes.

well, i've been looking around on my desktop because i was sure that i had the installer somewhere. i wanted to install the version i liked into my laptop. after all, i'm more likely to blog from my laptop these days. i'd been looking on the internet, and the only old version i'd found was a beta version that looks and acts very similar to the current version. for that i might as well get the current version! suddenly it dawned on me that i should type "download old flock" as my search term. voila! just a few results down i found links to several old versions, including 0.7.9.1 beta (last beta before it switched to the new look and feel).

so i'm happy to be flocking again. its not my default browser, but it does come in quite handy. maybe one of these days i'll do a real post on all its features i use.

anyway, the official story is that they don't offer it for download anymore because its based on an old version that is no longer supported by anyone. nuts to that! i don't need support. as for security, well there are many plugins out there that can help with that. its not like i depend on my browser for security anyway...

is there such a thing as security?

technorati tags:flock, 0.7.9.1, beta, installed, on, tx1000, running, winxp, sp2, totally, unsupported