A friend just asked about getting up to speed with RSS and I sighed. What to suggest… Bloglines is so slow, I’m enjoying Earthlink’s new Feedreader but it’s…well, it’s Earthlink. So why not just put him onto Flock so he can enjoy what a modern browser feels like, and use it for feeds as well? Good idea.

I’ve been with Flock since the beginning, and was awed by the marketing behind it, and wondered about the business model. That was a year ago, and lately it gets a lot more play time on my computer than Google’s browser FireFox. I still need FF for some of the extensions, but Flock is killer for it’s blog management tools, speed, and trouble-free js/java handling. I don’t know too much about what goes on behind the scenes with Java and complicated javascript screen maniuplation stuff (like fading menus and such) but I do know that my FireFox crashes way too often, and can’t do Hushmail. The current Flock has been a dream to use.

For feeds in Flock just click an RSS icon and bingo.. Flock parses the feed into an HTML page *and* provides a left side column for subscribing. A feed reader in the browser. NICE. Firefox (current release) doesn’t know the feed: protocol. I’ve been redirecting to feedburner to give webified feeds to visitors and to facilitate the transition to syndicated reading, but if more people would adopt modern browsers like Flock (heh heh) I wouldn’t need to hand my traffic over to that third party commercial entity.

Yes, I know the next Firefox has all the greatest features and more, and Flock is better at getting them out to the world, etc etc. whatever. I leave that stuff to the ubergeeks that download the nightlies and such. I just need a browser that works and Flock works for me right now.