Flock

Flock is the latest internet browser out here, and there's lots of talk & buzz. It's based on Firefox. They use the gecko engine. It's touted a 'social browser' and is Web 2.0 style. First, Opera goes free and the Opera 9.0 tech preview is realeased. Now, Flock is here.

At first I wasn't so sure about Flock. Now I know it's gonna rule when it's done.

1) It's Beautiful! Firefox looks like a serious work thing compared to Flock. Flock's got a cool Mac look.2) Bookmarks, Exuent. Favorites, Enter. Favorites isn't very different from Bookmarks, except that it's all stored on the web and integrated with del.icio.us. Social.
3) Integrated Feed Aggregator. This is something which Firefox didn't have. It also checks for feeds on your favorites and caches them. Another very nice thing is that pages with Feeds have a Feed button in the URL bar, like Firefox, but it shows you the stuff in the feed instead. That is quite useful. What happened to to Live Bookmarks? I have no idea...But who needs that when you can view the whole feed?
4) You own Shelf. There's a Shelf, where you can drag 'n drop webpages. Sort of like a 'a lil while later' box.
5) I'm having trouble with Integrated Blogging. It seems to work for most people. But weird stuff happens when I try to blog with my Blogger account.I'm very dissappointed here. I put the BlogID, API URL and it still doesn't work. Flock's auto settings don't get my correct blog. Maybe I'm doing something wrong...But the idea is good. It will encourage blogging.
6) Flickr Integration is nice for people who share images a lot.
7) When you start typing in the search box, Flock searches your history for relevant results.

There are quite a few more new stuff. There's the Blog and Flickr 'Top bar'. And you can change your toolbar on the spot to view different sets of bookmarks.The browsers seems to be slightly faster, but maybe it's because I've installed it newly.This is only a preliminary preview. There's gonna be a lot more on v1.0.

But there's a lot of things missing. Extensions for one. Most of them don't work. But time will heal that. There could have been something like an inbuilt Page rating system. They can do something like comments for pages and loading similar pages based on tags given by users.

Flock seems to be too less for Web 2.0. They need more idea, more breakthroughs. It needs to be big. Flock right now is just Firefox with a theme and extensions. Just a bit of delicious integration and blogging won't cut it.

I'm not exactly switching over from Firefox. Flock is great and all, but Firefox is light. I'll stick to the original, for now.

Update: I go the integrated blogging tool working. It works fine. I dunno what was wrong before...