Review: Flock Offers A Firefox For Bloggers

If you were trying to develop a new Web browser, your first instinct would probably be to try to make it as different from the leading products as possible. The folks at Flock had a different idea. They've based their new browser unabashedly on Firefox, with the difference that Flock, currently in beta, offers a variety of features geared toward today's social networking sites: photo-sharing sites, blogs, and bookmark-sharing sites.

Flock is recognizably based on Firefox -- placed side by side, the only immediate difference is that Flock's icons are more rounded, and there are additional icons for photo sharing, blogging, and RSS feeds. There is also a large starred icon to the left of the address field; this allows you to tag URLs for the favorites-sharing sites Shadows and del.icio.us.

Better Blogs
The blog tool is quite nifty. Flock supports blogs that use WordPress, Typepad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Blogger. I set Flock up for a LiveJournal account, and found that it really did work easily and well. On the first try, I was able to drop in an image, type in some text, and immediately post to my LiveJournal blog.

To make things even easier, the blog tool includes a "Web-Snippets Bar," a bar across the bottom of the window that acts as a sort of savings bank for images and text selections. You save images or text selections by either dragging and dropping them onto the bar, or right-clicking on the highlighted selection and choosing "Send to Web-Snippets. You can then drag and drop the text or the image into your blog entry. It's a very convenient and impressive feature.

Photo Services
The browser is more limited in its choice of photo services: It only uses Flickr and Photobucket, so if you're, say, a user of Google's new Picasa Web service, you're currently out of luck. Once you've established which service you use, you click on the Photo icon, and a new toolbar, the "photobar," appears, showing all the images you have stored. You can drag and drop any image from your browser or desktop onto the photobar to upload it to your service; you can also drag and drop any of those images to download it.

Reading Feeds
The RSS reader works easily and well. The "My News" button puts you into the reader, which appears on the left side of your browser window. Click on the RSS symbol on the right side of the URL and you are brought to a page that includes the name of the feed and the latest news items. You can either click on the button to add it to your list of feeds, or drag and drop it to the list. Your choice of how to view your feeds is limited by the standards of a dedicated RSS reader, but works nicely all the same. A "Front Page" lets you see a sampling of articles from all your feeds. You can look at each feed with or without article summaries, in one column or two; links on each article let you either save it or blog it.

Coping With Collections
The only real difficulty I had was with Flock's concept of bookmarking. Instead of using folders to organize bookmarks, it groups links into Collections, which can be accessed from a drop-down list on your Favorites toolbar -- Flock's name for the Bookmarks toolbar that appears below the Navigation toolbar in Firefox. Click on a Collection, and all the links appear on your Favorites bar. However, while this is an interesting approach, I much prefer the ability the more traditional method, which allows you to have folders of links on your Favorites bar.

On the other hand, Flock's approach to search -- which it calls "Live Search" -- is very interesting. As you type, Flock searches your list of favorites and your recent search history, and places those in the drop-down menu from the search box, along with the other search engines you've chosen to opt for. This lets you quickly choose recent or favorite sites for your results; if you want a more wide-ranging search, just hit Enter as usual, and your chosen search engine will come up in the browser.Incidentally, Flock, like Firefox, uses extensions to augment its abilities. Some of Firefox's more popular extensions are available, such as Forecastfox, Adblock, and the Google Toolbar. According to the extensions page, the Flock developers are promising to be able to convert Firefox extensions on the fly when requested "very soon."

Hardcore Firefox users will want to wait until more extensions are available. In addition, if you're intent on having the features available in Firefox 2, you're going to want to stick with the original. (To find out what's new in the upcoming version, check out our review of Firefox 2 Beta 1.) However, if you're into the various social networking services that are so popular these days, Flock is a fun, nicely tweaked browser that can make your online day easier.