I struggled for alliteration with that title, didn’t I?

Flock is a new browser which was launched overnight – it is still in beta (isn’t everything these days? 1.0 versions are so 90’s!), and it is billed as a browser for Web 2.0! Michael Arrington from TechCrunch broke the story of the launch.

I have been playing around with it this morning and I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it is a very slick interface on OS X – I haven’t tried it on a PC yet (see screenshot below), it has some nice functionality, and it appears to be fast and stable for a beta browser.

Like Firefox, Flock has the ability to add Extensions and when you browse to the available extensions for Flock, my three favourite Firefox extensions are available for Flock too (Adblock, Web Developer and Greasemonkey) – yeah!

Where Flock is supposed to differentiate from existing browsers is in support for Web 2.0-type apps. It does this by connecting to del.icio.us, Flickr and your blog software of (limited) choice (it has a built-in blog editor).

However, Flock was written on top of the Firefox codebase, so it should be stable and fast and it should support Firefox extensions – so no great shakes there. The blog editor is poor enough, it doesn’t support WordPress Categories, for instance, it doesn’t have a Quick Link for blockquoting and most importantly, it doesn’t seem to allow you to view/edit previous posts or drafts.

I found a very minor bug when adding my blog to the blog editor – notice in the dialog box below:

The explanatory text says “Click Finish to save your settings” whereas the button you need to click is labelled “Done”

The del.icio.us integration is nice – click the star button beside the uri and the address is automatically added to your del.icio.us account. You can turn on the ability to tag your del.icio.us bookmarks – this should be on by default in my opinion.

The Flickr integration I can’t really comment on as I don’t use Flickr much at all.

All in all, Flock is a nice browser but it underwhelms and I can’t see myself moving from Firefox to Flock just yet.