KAZEY JOURNAL

Flock, a new Web browser with a social bent has been released. Although still at its beta stage, I have been testing the “developer preview” version, and it does look promising. I really think they would beat firefox hands down. But who knows time would tell, especially with the current extensions and plugins firefox has.

You can download it here.

And from other sources it is stated that…..

Flock’s all about building Web services into a browser, but the Flock folks didn’t build a Favorites-synching service of their own. Instead, they built a friendly front-end for Del.icio.us, the popular, powerful, but somewhat geeky bookmark-sharing service. Among other things, that means you can get to the favorites you create in Flock even when you’re using another browser, as well as share your favorites with other Del.icio.us users. Right now, you’ve got to create a Del.icio.us account to use Flock’s synching feature, but the company says it’ll support other bookmark sites in the future.

The leverage-existing-services philosophy extends to blogging: Flock’s blog editor works with Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type. And it talks to Flickr to let you blog about photos that you (or other people) have taken. A nifty drag-and-drop, clipboard-like tool called the Shelf lets you tuck away bits of Web content for later blogging.

Like I say, Flock is definitely still a work in progress: Its site notes that bookmark importing isn’t finished and that Movable Type support isn’t fully baked (which is why I’m not posting this from within Flock). The site also makes mention of Flock supporting some Firefox extensions, but the two indispensable ones I tried to install—Greasemonkey and the A9 Toolbar—wouldn’t work. (Although if I were to leave Firefox behind for Flock, I probably wouldn’t need A9 anymore, since Flock more or less replicates its functionality.)

As far as I can tell (and I could be confused here), Flock also doesn’t sync Collections you create between multiple copies of the browser, so the synching it offers isn’t truly comprehensive. (Wouldn’t it be swell if there was a browser someday that silently synched absolutely everything, from your bookmarks to your privacy settings, between all the computers that you used it on?)

It’s nice to see that the browser wars aren’t just continuing—they’re spawning new products tailored to the needs of particular types of people. Unlike Firefox, which does a sensational job of appealing to the needs of just about anyone who uses the Net, Flock is more focused. If you’re not a bookmark maniac and don’t have a blog, you may not find anything here to lure you away from your current browser.

Source: PCWORLD