walkah: browser

One of my main reasons for switching to google reader was because of the excellent mobile interface. However, on my n91 I kept getting "Out of memory" errors after browsing a few pages. Restarting the phone would make the error go away, but again only for a few pages. Well, that's not cool. But, apparently it's a problem just in the default browser (based on webkit). While I applaud nokia for using a free, standards-compliant engine for their browser base, I kinda needs something that works.

Enter Opera mini. Mini is opera's free mobile browser, and while not open source, it at least works and seems to work quite well. I've never been a huge fan of opera's browser on the desktop, but they're my current mobile browser of choice.

the good folks at flock recently released the latest installment of the "web browser for (me) and (my) friends" - v0.7 a.k.a. "cardinal" a.k.a. "beta 1". now, i'm a long time "flockstar" (i even have the tshirt - but, if i'm being honest, this is the first release that i have actually been able (and wanted) to use as my default browser.

i was in san francisco recently for a few days, and the irrepressible will pate told me (shortly after this picture was taken) that i would be impressed with the next release (which was imminent at the time). he was right.

flock's ui feels more polished than i remember from any previous release. sure there are new icons, but thinks seem to be making more sense - falling into place. the del.icio.us integration actually works - and works well (including fixing a long time peeve of mine: the ability to *not* share some bookmarks). probably the most impressive new piece is the vastly improved flickr integration. i think flock's flickr topbar might actually be my favourite way to browse flickr now. and, is it me or does flock actually feel faster than firefox on os x?

i don't use flock's built in news reader, so i can't comment on that... but my one main gripe is still the blog editing tool. it has never supported categories, and seems to no longer even support tags. these are pretty basic features that i use (when i blog). I also no longer see a way to look at & edit old posts. so... it's ecto for me still on that front.

but if you're one of the web two point oh crowd (or wanna be) and use flickr, del.icio.us, etc... well you might wanna give this latest release a shot.

(oh, and yeah they relaunched their site using drupal, naturally)