Flock

There is a new browser in town. Imagine that somebody took the source code of our beloved Firefox and building a new browser around it. When Netscape did it they failed horribly, at least in my opinion. Why is Flock any different?

First of all, it doesn’t give me the feeling that I want to gauge my eyes out after using it. No, Flock is actually kind of pretty. It reminds me a bit of a combination of Opera and Mac OS X. Not bad, but not revolutionary either. You can download many beautiful themes for Firefox, so there must be something else that makes Flock different.

Well, there is. Flock is a social browser that integrates with some well known webservices such as del.icio.us for bookmarks and tagging and Flickr for photo sharing. Additionally it lets you edit your weblog right from the browser. I know, that last one doesn’t sound exiting, but it is different from what it sounds like.

The first thing I noticed was that my livemarks were gone and I have not found a way to restore them. I did see some screenshots of an earlier version of Flock that supported them but it appears they removed support for livemarks. They did incorporate a way to read feeds right from the browser, which reminds me a bit of Safari. Unfortunately Safari beats Flock here on both speed and usability.

The integration of del.icio.us is really an improvement over the plain old Firefox bookmarks manager. I’ve always struggled with the old concept, because it was way too limited for the enormous amount of bookmarks that I keep. Regular del.icio.us was an improvement, but it simply lacked the easy-of-use of an integrated solution. The way Flock solved this problem sounds very interesting.

The weblog editor is definitely something new. Instead of logging into your weblog and using the administration interface to manage you weblog, you can simply edit existing posts and create new posts by using the blog topbar. How does it work? Well, you it uses the same technology as other external weblog editing tools, such as MarsEdit, Ecto or wBloggar. One of the main advantages is the wysiwyg editor and the ability to drag content from other weblogs and drop it into your own. The weblog editor will automatically create a blockquote for you, including the source of the original content.

So far, it looks like Flock did a very decent job. It’s not yet completely finished and it could use some polish in some area’s, but for a 0.5 release it is pretty impressive. The good news is, is that Flock will release the source code back to the community which it build upon.