Flock is a Web browser and it’s also called 'the social Web browser'.
People call it like that because it is a must have tool for those who hold blogs (Weblogs) and surf on message boards as their main activities on the Internet. The program has features that make your life so much easier if you are one of the persons who match the profile described above.
Basically this browser is built around a
Firefox engine. In fact, this version is a Firefox upgraded clone, which means both good and bad things.
The good thing about this browser is that it behaves itself like Firefox and it includes the extension support. The bad thing about it is that there are just a few extensions designed for Flock.
Several extensions from Firefox work on Flock, but most of them can make this browser malfunction. You can stick to the small list of extensions that is provided by the producer.
The similarity list ends here, because the
RSS support of this browser is way much better than the original browser. It comes with some subscriptions and you can easily make your own. This is one of the best Web browser built in news feed reader that I have tested.
Another helpful tool for the bloggers or the message board fans is the possibility to create Snippets. You can find a button that shows a grey area where you can drop images or text that you want to use later. You can create those Web Snippets without dragging by using the dedicated button.
If you need the snippets, all you need to do is drag-and-drop it from the toolbar to the text area. This is so much easier compared to the old fashion clipboard.
Another helpful feature is the photo bar. With this tool you are able to quickly upload pictures to your Flickr or Photobucket account. You can also use this feature by dragging an image over it directly or from the Web Snippets.
There's one more feature that helps the bloggers. The browser has the support for blogs hosted by WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal and Blogger. It also has the support for APIs (Application Programming Interface). A list of them is: Movable Type, MetaWeblog, Blogger, WordPress and Atom for those who have self-hosted blogs.
Pluses: it has a lot of helping features that can make from this browser a 'social' one.
Drawbacks / flaws: since it uses Firefox's engine it does the same job when rendering the
Acid2 Web browser test. It doesn't have the support for all the Firefox extensions.
In conclusion: If "community" and "blog" are a couple of your main keywords, this is a nice browser I hope you’ll enjoy. Since Flock is based on Firefox v2, it has become a better and more usable browser. At the same time, the producers redesigned completely some of its features, so I think you might like the improvements and the better support for the blog engines.
version reviewed: 0.9.0.2
