For quite some time my personal browser start page has been this:

The Google / Firefox Start page in the upper and my own favorite sites mix in the lower window. I love the look, but it has become a pain to keep it updated. Links have changed, my favorite sites have changed, some don’t exist anymore, and thus the time has come to try something new.

Fortunately, there are many services out there that will do much of the work for you, and in my quest to find the best replacement I tested a few and will share my experiences with you. Let me just say that any personalized start page requires a bit of work - constantly. That’s pretty obvious.

Well, my two week descent into unusability and lack of functionality that is Safari, is finally over.

About two weeks ago I undertook to stick to Safari all the time, 24 hours a day/7 days a week, while at home. Thank goodness I had an oasis of sanity every weekday when I went in to work. As slow as my office computer is (P4 with 384M of ram) it was a relief to be able to drag my mouse backwards to return to the previous page.

I’ve been a Firefox user for a few years now, since it came out really, and I love it. It’s a great browser and the extensions can turn it into anything you want it to be, from an FTP client to a multiplayer pong game.

I’ve been using a Mac for a little over a year now and while I’ve opened Safari a few times for fun, I’ve never used Apple’s built-in browser for any real length of time. I decided a few days ago to see — just for the heck of it — whether I could use Safari exclusively at home for two weeks. While I certainly do miss Firefox and all it’s great, useful extensions, the challenge is made a little easier because of Safari’s speed. I haven’t done any scientific experimentation, but it is my impression that Safari is faster than Firefox.

At first, Flock appealed to me in a purely superficial way. As you may have noticed, I’m a sucker for style, good design and pretty textures, and Flock certainly unites all of these features.

Fortunately, that’s not all there is to tell. Flock is based on Mozilla Firefox and was first released in 2005. Back then it may have been a little bit ahead of its time since social web was only in its beginnings. Recently however, Flock has enjoyed very positive media coverage and its popularity virtually exploded in the beginning of this year, reaching close to three million downloads and increasing the number of active users by 135% [Source via Wikipedia].