I’m using Flock as my main browser. However for most of you, Firefox will be your choice. The reason I would recommend using Flock over Firefox to create the ultimate student research browser is the number of built in functionalities which really is quite useful for a student.

By using Flock you get stacks of features built right into the browser while retaining speed, performance and security which could potentially be compromised when installing so many extensions in Firefox. So jump in for my Flock review.

Cross-Platform

Like Firefox, Flock is compatible across all three major platforms, Mac, Windows and Linux, which is great considering the number of students who use other platforms instead of Windows.

Social Networking

I’m going to assume just about every student is on either Facebook, MySpace or both, so the inclusion of them into the browser certainly makes life easier.

As well as these two, there are 20 other supported services which you can see these in the image below:

One glaring omission is Windows Live which has around 300 million users worldwide compared to Gmail’s 20 ““ 30 million. Considering the huge Windows Live update happening right now I would assume the Flock team is working on including all of this new functionality.

Blogging

Plenty of students have blogs and Flock is perhaps the best browser for making blogging easier ““ it includes a decent blogging editor and support for several blogging services such as Blogger, WordPress.com, Blogsome, Xanga and LiveJournal as well as self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Research

Now most students are required to do a fair amount of research and study and Flock is the perfect browser to do this.

Flock has a built in feature called the Web Clipboard which really is Flock’s most understated tool. This clipboard takes the form of a sidebar onto which you can drag just about anything, links, text and images for later.

What’s so great about it is that unlike favourites which require sorting and organizing, using the Clipboard just requires the dumping of a whole stack of information while you research a topic.

There is one additional extension which I would recommend most of all and that is Zotero, the research extension for Firefox. All Firefox extensions usually work fine in Flock so you’ll have no problems there.

Zotero is fantastic for collecting a huge stack of online resources together for more careful reading and analysis later. I barely scrape the surface of its functionality in my own usage, but basically you can save webpages quickly for later (offline if you need it) reading. You can tag keywords, take notes and use various other ways of organization.

Also coming soon is Zotero sync for transferring notes between computers, a great addition to the tool.

Search Easier

Tell me, just how often do you Google something just to go straight to the Wikipedia entry? This extension modifies the Google search page so the most relevant Wikipedia result is shown along with search results.

WorldCat is a web service which can be used to locate books and journals in the nearest library to you. Add it to your browser from here.

Flock also includes instant results searching for many search engines like Yahoo, Google and Technorati. As you type in your search query the results are brought up instantly below the search box. I find it one of Flock’s handiest features.

This is what I use as my student browser, do any of you know of any other great research extensions?