BenBishop.me.uk

Flock? Excuse me? What did you say? 

Well to those who aren’t quite sure what I am getting at, Flock is an open source web browser that has come on the scene recently shouting pretty loudly about the features its offering. Available at the moment only as a developer preview but based on Firefox’s code, the Flock team have come along and put together a modern, slick looking browser with some radical ideas.

The Social Scene

Social bookmarking is a really good way to organise and bookmark the web from a personal perspective and it gives you the ability to share with others, gems you find along the way. Social bookmarking sites include the ability to access your bookmarks where ever you are and by tagging every page you store it makes retrieval very easy. The social ‘tag’ comes from the ability to share with friends and check out popular and new lists provided by the sites. At this stage of the developer preview Del.icio.us is the only social bookmaking site that is integrated with Flock but more is promised. Upon release of version 1.0, I would expect further compatibility with Furl, Reddit and possibly others but Del.icio.us is probably the most well known and is my first choice anyway.

Flock does a good job of integrating Del.icio.us, the social bookmarking tool, with your browser’s bookmarks or ‘favourites’. A way to store your bookmarks both online and within your browser, Flock synchronises with Del.icio.us on start-up and every time you add, delete or edit one of your bookmarks from the Del.icio.us site or from within the ‘Favourites Manager’ (see below image). From within Flock clicking on the ‘Star this Page’ icon (see below image) from the toolbar adds the page to your Del.icio.us bookmarks. The option to add tags from within the browser is available by clicking on the little arrow beneath the icon or the option can be enabled each time you click on ‘Star this Page’ from within the options. In my opinion making this the default is the sensible option as revisiting pages simply to add tags defeats the convenience of this potentially quality feature.

Blog Fanatics 

Further evidence that these guys are pushing boundaries in the browser market is the browser integration for bloggers. Some figures suggest there are over 100 million blog’s worldwide and combining the tools to view the web and write about it is a natural evolution.

Flock’s approach to Blogging is excellent and the WYSIWYG editor while it needs work will make Blogging so much more accessible to people. Having an icon on the toolbar (see image above) and facility to ‘Blog this’ just a right click a way provides well thought out functionality. They have taken this a stage further with top bars, like the familiar side bar it adds customizable features to the browser in the same vein as Firefox’s Extensions (a feature Flock has kept, the web developer extension available for both, a steal). The Flickr topbar, a drag and drop feature for blog posts are intuitive and compliment the editor very well. One of Firefox’s great strengths is the community that has grown around it with ‘Extensions’ and Top bars are an expansion of this. Additionally there is ‘The Shelf’, a feature used as a temporary store or scrap book for the web; it’s a handy tool that could become the bloggers best friend.

Yet more? 

Flock’s AJAX like Java based search facility in the upper right hand corner of the window offers a good example of some of the thought going into this product. Each page you visit with each search you do is indexed and made available in a drop down list, refining your search as you type. Anyone familiar with Firefox’s Google start page or Google’s Suggest would be familiar with this; the search box in the top right hand corner of this blog uses similar techniques.

RSS is an exciting technology but the best solution harvest this information is yet to be found. Flock takes Firefox’s enthusiasm for RSS or News feeds and puts its spin on syndication. With automatic caching of sites you have added to your favourites and the ability to combine feeds in one aggregated view, this is another feature of some potential.

Flocking it!

As you may have guessed by now I am a big fan of Flock and if rumours are true there is much more to come from this browser and its team. Flock is by no means perfect though, it is a developer preview after all, but each new build it there seems to be improvements with stability and they are ironing out the bugs one by one. Its not for everyone at this stage and may well develop and become more of a niche browser than one that will change the face of the web for everyone.

While main updates have slowed down (though hourly buids are available to the daring), could this be the build up to  next release based on Firefox 1.5?

Flocking Opinion

Joining the current battles between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, the Mozilla Foundation’s now cult Firefox and to a lesser extent Opera, it’s an ambitious project for a small group who originally intended to produce high quality ‘Extensions’ for FireFox. In an already crowded market, is there enough space for another browser? Taking some great, fresh ideas and engineering them into a potentially slick package might just be enough to carve enough of a market to make this a viable business proposition. Free software can make money and earn revenue for backers but whether there is enough to keep the venture capitalists happy remains to be seen.

Download Flock

Intrigued? Join the growing Flock Community and download Flock here.