Flock 1.0 beta: a social web browser

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Social Software, Beta

Flock 1.0 beta: a social web browser

by Brad Linder Oct 19th 2007

We have to admit, we've been a bit skeptical about Flock in the past. It's a web browser built on Firefox code with a whole bunch of social networking features. Because you know, you can't use Firefox to access social networking/bookmarking sites.

But something funny happened when we downloaded and installed the new Flock 1.0 beta that was released today: We liked it. The browser includes a blog editing client, a "web clipboard" that lets you drag and drop images, text and URLs into your sidebar for handy access on other sites, and a media bar for finding YouTube and other videos.

The coolest stuff happens in the sidebar. Flock will automatically detect when you login to a social networking site like Flickr and pop up a Flickr-specific sidebar that shows you a list of contacts and their current status. Click on your contact and their page will pop up in the main window. Click on the media tab under their name and a new bar pops up at the top of your window with all of their recently uploaded images and videos.

There's also a nifty "my world" tab that shows you all of your most recently viewed bookmarks and RSS feeds. Flock is a bit of a memory hog compared with Firefox, but if you've got enough RAM, Flock really does look like a great tool for anyone who spends half of their day on Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites. Keep in mind, this is still a public beta. No final release date for Flock 1.0 has been set yet.

Tags: firefox, flock, social-browser

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Matt Denner said 11:36PM on 10-19-2007

Is there a reason that Flock couldn't just work as an extension to Firefox?

Jake said 6:25PM on 10-20-2007

I believe that in an early concept stage, Flock was intended as an addon, but as features were fleshed out it became clear that the depth of the changes to the codebase would be quite deep (for some reason the editor stands out in my mind) thus there would be severe conflicts with other addons. Also, if memory serves, Flock development has at times been rather slow and even stalled. However, I am not a developer and I haven't looked at that recently.

Jake said 6:54PM on 10-20-2007

As an afterthought, proposed features in the next Firefox release are expected to play kindly with external editors (google docs, etc.), so a distant future Firefox addon mimicking Flock seems likely.

danielgreenb said 8:27AM on 10-21-2007

I'd hate my browser to get all messed up by media. and with my 8hands I can access all my media straight from the desktop. For me, it's way better. and it has lots of other cool features like notifications and IM.

Jake said 10:26PM on 10-21-2007

My understanding is that many mobile bloggers in particular lose their posts with the default website editors and there's no backup copy, and while one could edit in another application, that's impractical. This makes Flock ideal for bloggers, and with the advent of music and media blogs, I can see how Flock would have a big target audience. I gave it a test run and it looks like the debut of Flock will be worth waiting for. Since it created it's own market, it's hard to rate, but with a little work on the theme I'd give it 8 out of 10. It's also fairly stable and installs/uninstalls cleanly if you want to try it out. It won't touch your Firefox profiles, although if you choose it will import Firefox settings. For anyone who blogs I would definately recommend.

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