Flock Browser

I’ve been messing around with the Flock web browser lately and am really impressed. Although it’s a beta, it has a bunch of great features that make some aspects of web browsing and content management easier and even fun.

Web 2.0 Browser?

Flock is built on the open source Mozilla Firefox code base, which is a great start. It’s very standards-compliant and stable from the get-go. Why didn’t Microsoft think of that?

The folks at Flock have taken the browser in a little different, Web 2.0 direction.

First, they gave the browser a bit of a facelift. Although the basic design is still somewhat Firefox-ian, new functions are incorporated and old ones have had an overhaul to accomodate some of the ways some people are using browsers today.

“a heavy emphasis on the photo experience (from upload through discovery to notification), RSS support, dramatic improvements to the search box (including a new take on favorites), and blogging.”
Introducing Flock Beta 1

Sure, you can do some of this stuff in Firefox with a few added extensions, but Flock has put it all together in one slim package.

Some of my favorite features:

• connect to a Flickr account to upload, share, manage and conveniently use pics on the web.
• connect to your del.ico.us account to share and manage bookmarks
• connect to several popular blogging and content management platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Moveable Type, Typepad, LiveJournal, and Blogger.
• built-in post editor lets you create and save blog/CMS content locally and post directly when ready.
• the photobar lets you drag and drop photos into your blog or CMS posts.
• snippets feature allows you to collect web content, and will automatically insert the appropriate <cite> tags with links.
• built-in RSS reader is a great improvement over the standard Firefox live bookmarks.

So, I’m going to keep using Flock because it’s fun and helpful, even though I can’t see divorcing Firefox as my browser of choice.

If you want to learn more:

• Check out the Flock site.
• There’s a good interview with Chris Messina, formerly of Flock, on episode 5 of the Web 2.0 Show.
• Other podcast appearances from Flockstars listed in Will Pate’s post.

technorati tags:flock, browser, blog, cms, flockbrowser