Flock 1.0 Beta


I’d heard about the Flock browser a while ago. “The Social Browser”, it claimed to add more social interactivity to your web experience. Not my cup of tea, but still. I’ve been an ethusiastic user of Firefox and later Camino, so when the Cult of Mac mentioned that the beta version of Flock 1.0 was out, I figured what the hell.

I’ve been using a lot of add-ons to Firefox, notably Scribefire and the FireFTP (or whatever it’s called these days), so I was curious about the blogging abilities of Flock. As you can see, it works pretty well.

You can also add favourites straight to del.ic.ous, or deli.ci.ous. or deli, ah whatever, upload photos to flickr and Facebook, subscribe to RSS feeds and so on. This is all very nice, and I can see Flock becoming quite popular. Now, for my use, I honestly don’t think I’ll be using it all that much. I don’t upload a lot of photos, and when I do, it’s usually a series, so it’s a lot easier for me to use iPhoto whenever I do so. For blogging purposes, it’s a mixed bag. I use a Wordpress widget for Dashboard (that and the value converter is probably the only widgets I ever use.) or Qumana. Sometimes, I just email myself, or send an MMS. And  whenever I open Firefox, Scribefire.

Camino is still faster, and now includes natively the holy grail for me: a flash blocker. I have no major problem with ads online, but flash movies slow down my pages and so, I would like to see them go. I suppose I could shell out for a faster broadband connection, but it’s fast enough for everything else, so why bother?

Anyhoo, Flock looks pretty solid, and if you’re someone who uses all these sort of functions, you should give it a spin. It’s available for Macs, PCs and Linux. It’s free, and apparently, you can use certain Firefox add-ons. Skins should be available soon, too.