You’re not still using Internet Explorer, are you?

I discovered this article about lots of alternative web browsers (thanks to IA guru, Dean Wilson). And I’ve now downloaded a couple of them to my girlfriend’s Mac to see what they’re like (I’m kind of ‘between Macs’ so to speak!).

The first of these browsers is Flock.

It’s like a really slick browser with community stuff built in. It seems that once you sign into your delicious, flickr, youtube or facebook accounts your friends appear in a sidebar. You can then drag and drop web content on their names to share stuff with them. I’ve not tried it out properly yet. I plan to put it through its paces when I get my new Mac.

It’s also fully RSS-ed up. I didn’t really get into the whole RSS reader thing – I was too enthusiastic in subscribing to everything that interested me and then got disheartened when my unread articles topped the 1000 mark – but this seems like a nicer way of doing it.

The other browser I liked was Shiira.

It’s been programmed in Cocoa – which means that it’s made specifically for the Mac and runs about as fast as Safari. One of the features lets you do private surfing that doesn’t store cookies or history – which makes it ideal for people who surf for porn on a shared computer.

It also has a page dock so that you can see a thumbnail of your tabs. And you can view your web pages in full screen mode. Which makes for a rather yummy browsing experience on Flash sites.

Firefox has been my default browser for a couple of years now. But it looks like I’m going to be switching soon. As soon as I get my new laptop, that is.