The first thing that anybody would be saying on seeing the title is why an another new Browser, don’t we have enough clutter of them. But Flock stands out from all those other browsers out there, it doesn’t just aim for a good browsing experience, but takes it to the next level, by bring a whole together new user experience in the way we access the Web. So no wonder that it calls it self the Social Web Browser.
Flock (current version 0.7.7, I am using v0.7.6) is based on Firefox 1.5, so it comes by default with all the advantages (or disadvantages) of Firefox, which means that all the extension models , add-ons etc are all there. Not all Firefox extensions are compatible with Flock, I had to hack a few of them to make them run under Flock. Flock hit the web at the right time when Social networking sites are all over the web and are quite a rage. The social aspects of Flock are:
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Photo Sharing: The Photo sharing service of flock currently supports Flickr and PhotoBucket. Flock makes it very easy to upload/manage photos with any of these services, right from within the browser including Bulk uploads with tagging. The organizer is placed very neatly just below the toolbars in a non-obtrusive manner. I tried this with both Flickr and PhotoBucket and the thing I liked about it is that it had the same interface in interacting with both the services.
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Blogs: Flock has a simple editor for Posting to Blogs, it currently supports WordPress, MovableType, TypePad, Live Journal and Blogger. It does not have a WYSIWIG editor like Windows Live Editor, but has simple text based editor where you can modify the html source. I haven’t tried out posting mainly because I was using Windows Live Writer.
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Feeds: Firefox had basic feed support through Live Bookmarks, v2.0 added little bit more through Feed preview, but flock’s implementation of Feeds is way ahead of that, so much that it can be truly called a Feed Aggregator. The Front page view that it has for Feeds is probably something that many feed users are going to like.
It hides most of the complexity of working with feeds so I am sure that for newcomers to Feed Technology and Basic users, flock is surely a recommended option. Since I am a heavy user of Feeds, I am better of with Feed Demon or Rss Bandit. -
Bookmark sharing: Flock had done away with the Bookmarks concept of Firefox and used their own called Collections. All bookmarks are added to these Collections, and can be optionally tagged. The best part is that these collections can be synched with a online bookmarking service. It currently supports del.icio.us and shadows. I used shadows to store my bookmarks. Sharing of individual bookmarks is optional, and you can decide at any time wether you want to share a particular bookmark. The only problem I have with their implementation of Collections is that they have a single level of hierarchy, not a full fledged tree model. My personal advice to the Flock team , please add the tree model of bookmark managing and add bookmark sharing service on top of it. This has been one of the top reasons which sometimes make me think whether I should continue using Flock.
The Search box functionality has also been customized when compared to Firefox so that we get search results in a menu as we type. The menu displays search results from past history and also results from yahoo.
My two main problems with Flock are
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Collections not having tree model, which I have already mentioned, and
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It uses a lot of Memory, it very easily takes up to 200 MB of memory after opening a few tabs.
In the end would I recommend it to everyone ?, yes it is a good browser, and it should surely catch up with all people soon, so go ahead and download it.
