Apr 27 2009
Attack of the Firefox Clones
Firefox clones share the rendering engine and extensions support of Mozilla’s flagship browser. So, rather than load up and slow down your Firefox with every feature on the web, you can spread your browsing over multiple browsers.
The Clones:
Back to where we started: the new Netscape browser is a Firefox clone with a few added features.
There are Netscape.com-specific features like posting to Netscape’s version of dig and interaction with your Netscape email. There’s also a cool mini-browser and link pane where you can stash items for reference later.
Flock has been around for a while, and integrates cool social media features like easy bookmark and photo sharing.
Flock makes a great dedicated blog-poster, with built in posting to multiple blog sites and systems. It also has a very nice feed reading interface.
This new kid on the block is a media-centric mutation of Firefox. Wyzo comes bundled with e BitTorrent client and a new look.
Wyzo also has a defaulted media search page that makes searching for images and video easy. Combined with other media-centric extensions Wyzo could make a great media manager.
SeaMonkey is the extension of the legacy Internet Suite that started with Netscape Communicator. It shares a rendering engine with Firefox and supports many extensions.
The main appeal of SeaMonkey is the integration with a mail and chat client as well as an HTML editor.
With this collection of Firefox knock-offs, consider tailoring the browsers around function. You may want to dedicate a streamlined browser to editing TiddlyWiki files. Another you might want to outfit for Web Design with developer extensions like DOM Inspector and Web Developer tools. For your media browser, don’t forget the Scrapbook extension or a Fast Video Downloader.
Give your Firefox a break. There’s no reason to burden your primary browser when you can summon the clones to help.