Flock Beta Browser Review

I had signed up to be notified when the public beta of the new Flock browser was available a while back and had basically forgotten about it until an email arrived finally notifying me that the beta was available. I downloaded and installed the beta (available here) and have been toying around with the browser for a bit already. I have to say that my initial impression is very positive, even though I had been skeptical about some of the features when I first heard about them.First off, when you install, Flock allows you to replicate your Firefox (or IE if you dare) favorites, cookies, saved passwords, etc (Flock is based on Mozilla just as Firefox). This all went very smoothly. Next Flock asks you if you would like to add any of the additional features such as Flickr integration for photo sharing, blog integration (sorry no blogCFC, but Blogger and WordPress are there...or it appears any XML-RPC API enabled blog software), del.icio.us integration, and a news section. This was made extremely easy to set up. When the browser opened, it was reminiscent of Firefox (at least more so than IE) but with a much friendlier UI.

The first thing I tried was the Flickr integration. Now, I have to admit that I rarely ever used my Flickr account, however, this browser could change that. Clicking on the photos button in the toolbar brought up an overlay of my photos. I clicked "uploader" and an integrated photo manager popped open. It allows you to drag and drop photos into the browser window, and even perform some basic editing like cropping and rotating. Adding the title, description and tags all seemed easier than doing it directly through Flickr if you can believe it, and when I was done, I clicked upload and, after being informed of my account details including space used, space available, and amount of space used by my upload, all my photos were added to my Flickr account perfectly and were also available via the overlayed toolbar.

Using the My News button brings up a sidebar that included a number of preset RSS feeds in the categories I had selected when I installed. The news came up in Flock's RSS feed format which was amazingly easy to read, and even added features that allow you to save your favorite entries for later viewing, or inform you of items you have already viewed. You could blog certain articles if your blogging software is supported by Flock (see above). You can also easily add items to your "My News" whenever you view an RSS feed, it offers a subscribe button prominently displayed at the top of the page.

The del.icio.us integration seemed to offer a means of extending your favorites. Apparently searching via the built in search bar can also search your favorites (as well as your history), which is a neat feature. The favorites manager seemed also to somewhat loosely mix del.icio.us with browser favorites. Also, when you are at a site you have added as a favorite this is indicated by a bright orange star on the browser bar. Clicking the star once on an unsaved page will add it to your favorites. Clicking it twice brings up a toolbar that allows you to add the page to del.icio.us as well as any of your browser favorites. You are also given the option to share this favorite with your other computers (I assume those that are running Flock as well - though I have not had the opportunity to test this). One note on this, it did not seem to recognize my subfolders when it imported my Firefox favorites.

One other disappointment, Flock didn't seem to support the Firefox extensions I have come to know and love, though it does supprt extensions. The extensions download page (which did have several at the moment but also mentioned something about converting extensions on the fly as a future enhancement - the feature was actually there, but it said it was under heavy development and may not work). Nonetheless, several of the extensions I already knew from Firefox seem to have been converted already (I am not an extension junkie like some however).

All in all, I am quite impressed as you can see. I am tempted to download the beta at work as well and give it a try for a while. I can honestly see myself using several of the features I have described above, and like I mentioned, the UI in every aspect is about as friendly as they come. I definitely recommend giving it a test drive. To download the beta, you can go to www.flock.com/download