flipthedolphin

Flock is out.

Flock is a free web browser that makes it easier than ever to share photos, stay up-to-date with news from your favorite sites, and search the Web.

The default search engine is Yahoo but you can easily change that. Flock stresses photos with built-in Flickr and Photobucket support. Not only does Flock have Live Bookmarks like Firefox but it also has a Feed reader where you can look at the articles themselves.

Flock also has built-in blogging where you can drag and drop photos. In Flock you can also favorite sites and tag them via del.icio.us.

from Technology Wrap

- the following are my very first impressions (absolutely not a complete and deep review) -

The Download and the setup

I’ve downloaded the beta (0.7 version available from the flock download page) with my download manager (the server was probably overwhelmed by requests because withtout the d/l manager the speed was barely 20 KB/s). The download size was about 7 MB.

The setup process on my notebook (on which I have installed firefox too) gone well. Nothing has been harmed though the space required for the installation was about 40 MB. Quite a bit.

The first run: setting up your web

After the setup it automatically imported my coockies, pwds and bookmarks (and something else) from Firefox. Kewl!

Right after the import process you’re presented with a setup dialog. You’re asked what you want to configure. You can setup your flickr account, your blog, your del.icio.us account, your news…

I’ve selected everything and started to configure.
First step is the search dialog.

I only had minor issues with the flickr account: the popup windows was not opening. I couldn’t set it up the right way.

After a while I close the antivirus (Avast) and it all started working. I really don’t know if it was the problem but closing it down (arresting the web protection provider) worked. I could easly set up my account and import my flickr contacts.

The Flickr Photos

Clicking the photo button bring down the photo slider. I can view my pics or my contact’s pics. How cool is that?

You can then click on one of the pics to go to the flickr page.

The News and the Bookmarks

RSS and Bookmarks. How could a social browser like flock leave these features out? Indeed such features are present and they are well implemented. Great stuff here. You have an RSS reader inside your browser. Quite well integrated!

and what about bookmarks?
They seamlessly interact with your del.icio.us (or shadows) account. You can share your bookmarks with anyone on the net or with your other computer. Or keep ‘em totally private (locally stored in your flock profile folder).

You can edit them and tag them. Geat stuff. Great bookmark search too. Nice.

Can we use it to blog?

Here it is a though area: wordpress has a quite nice back-end and you can easly write posts, save ‘em, edit categories, file stuff, edit stuff… and so on…

Flock cannot cope with the wordpress backend (oh… did I mention that you can use flock with many other blog tools???).

I still prefer wordpress but I like the idea of flock being able to kinda interact with my wordpress installation. If you write your posts with flock, It can automatically add technorati tags at the end of the posts for example. Without the technorati plugin I mean. Neat.

You cannot however edit your categories. Create, rename, move stuff around. You just can’t do it. You still need the wordpress backend.

So…

So this is flock. A great, light and fast browser with rich features that will make the web a better place. I think flock is here to stay.