Flock, The Browser: Go Get It!
Last fall, Flock hit the blogosphere in a developer pre-release version. We played with it, and it had some great featuers…but it was buggy (as you might expect), and it didn’t make the "everyday use" test.
Last week, Flock announced a Beta release of their browser…and we’re proud to say that it rocks our socks off.
The premise of Flock is slightly different than we’ve become accustomed to with browsers. Sure, it’s got tabs, extensions, pop-up blocking, all that…because it’s based on Firefox. What it does that Firefox doesn’t do is integrate the social side of the web directly into the browser.
Do you use Flickr or PhotoBucket? Wouldn’t it be cool if you could browse photos from your favorite users without having to visit the site? How about if you could drag and drop images from the web directly into your albums, without loading an external uploader? Flock does that.
What about del.icio.us? If you’ve been around the web much, you’ve probably seen the social bookmarking tool…you could even be an active user. What if, instead of an extension buried in a menu, you had del.icio.us integration with your bookmarks? Flock does that.
I’ll bet you use RSS feeds, in some form or another. Flock has a built in news aggregator that makes browsing feeds pleasurable. It creates a summary/snapshot page of recently updated articles, by category, giving you a quick glimpse of what’s going on in your feeds. You can always delve into the meat and potatoes of each source, but it saves you the time of sorting through the "stuff."
Do you blog? Or better yet, do you get lazy on your blogging because it’s inconvenient to post? What if your browser had a built in blog composition utility, letting you drag and drop content within your browser, giving you a spot to write up your article, and publish it…without ever leaving the browser? Flock does that.
While we don’t use the blogging faculty of Flock (because of our fairly stringent, self-imposed guidelines), it’s incredibly handy for the every day blogger. Really.
They’ve incorporated desktop search in the search bar, providing localized results (much like Google Desktop) next to search engine results.
And best of all? We’ve been using it exclusively for the last week…and we haven’t crashed it once. It’s available for Windows, OS X and Linux, and because it’s built on the open source Firefox engine, you can trust its safety and compatibility.
Go get it…you’ll thank us.
Technorati Tags: browser, flock
July 7th, 2006 at 2:43 am
I decided to give Flock a test-drive on my iBook G4 and it’s quickly became my preferred browser. Really SWEET!
July 10th, 2006 at 4:01 am
I think I’m going to have to give flock a try
August 18th, 2006 at 10:34 am
it would be great if flock supports blinklist. Anyway, I used before and it was really buggy. When the beta is out, I’ll give it a try again.
September 7th, 2006 at 7:28 am
I tried Flock quite a while ago, and while I found it interesting, it just wasn’t for me. I preferred the functionality and flexibility of Firefox instead. When I last tried it, there weren’t many extensions for it. Still, it’s a nice looking browser.
September 16th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
I might try it. I want something that makes life easier. Does it come in Mac flavor?