Flock flaps closer to takeoff with a new version 0.9
Flock, a web browser based on Firefox but filled with more “Web 2.0-y goodness”, has released a new version. This time they’re up to 0.9 beta. The browser is tightly integrated with a lot of the popular social web services like Flickr, LiveJournal, Ma.gnolia.com, Xanga, YouTube and many more.
The most prominent new feature is “My World” a glorified personalized Start Page like iGoogle. It’s a specialized feed reader for updated photos, videos and feeds to make it easy to track your social-web “world” along with a list of your favorite bookmarks. The integrated view exposes many features that were previously shunted into toolbars tacked on to the browsing experience.
The photo bar, now known as the Media Bar, has also experienced a big upgrade with the addition of video support for YouTube and AOL’s Truveo which is experiencing a lot of growth. Navigating through images and video has improved with new controls, search and filtering capabilities. The thumbnail images in the Media Bar can also be previewed with a mouse much like Microsoft’s Live Search for images. For those of you uploading images to Flickr and Photobucket, these interfaces have been revamped as well although it’s not as feature-rich as many 3rd party applications.
Thankfully the built-in feed reader has received some attention. It actually may be a contender for some people. The feed reader now supports a “river of news” view and the speed has improved immensely. I’m a big fan of readers that only mark articles that have been displayed on the screen as read, and Flock’s reader certainly does that well. The ability to add feeds and media discovered on web pages has also been improved. Those who pride themselves on being super organized will be pleased to find that they can now create nested folders for categorizing feeds. This functionality has been extended to local bookmarks as well. Even with all the new functionality the user interface remains remarkably intuitive.
A new addition to Flock is the “Web Clipboard”, a sidebar that you can drag photos, links, some web video and text into. You’re able to organize items into folders or click the “blog” button to open up Flock’s integrated blog editing tool. Here you can author a post and add descriptive tags. Unfortunately embedding audio and video isn’t supported at this time. A few new blogging platforms are enabled by version 0.9 including Xanga and Blogsome. It’s not the best editor but it’s certainly acceptable. I think the Web Clipboard will be invaluable for people looking to quickly save off web content that interests them and then quickly enable them to add their own comments.
The updated Firefox underpinnings have added features that have been present in Firefox for awhile now: In-line spell check, anti-phishing and restore-able browser sessions. I imagine quite a few security vulnerabilities have been addressed as well.
With the addition of some new features Flock is shaking off users’ perception that it’s just a collection of Firefox plugins that have been bundled with the browser. It’s clear that a lot of effort has gone into integrating the features with each other in a manner that isn’t overbearing. Even so this browser is clearly for people that are already comfortable with a lot of social websites. Otherwise the sheer number of items that light up, can be clicked on or animate when you hover the mouse may be too much to bear. The problem is that this market is already familiar with adding plugins to Firefox, so they may opt for best-of-breed offerings like Fire Uploader, PicLens, Sage and ScribeFire and more. Worse yet, Mozilla has its sights set on adding social network integration to Firefox with something called The Coop. This may pull the rug right out from under Flock. In the mean time Flock is a pretty darn good product and I’m sure their developers are hard at work coming up with new features to differentiate themselves from the competition.
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