I am a software engineer, currently working as a Consultant at Flock - Quick Review
More than a review, this is just a quick pointer to Flock, a new browser based on Firefox but with some new features that make it very interesting for the Web 2.0 crowd.
What’s Good?
Out of the box, Flock comes with full del.icio.us integration for your bookmarks, if you want it. The whole concept of bookmarks has evolved into something called favorites, which you really have to use for a while to really understand. Tagging is also integrated into the browser for bookmarks, blog posts and other elements.
Blogging is also supported as standard, and only a click away. Your blog configuration is auto-detected from the URL, so it’s trivial to set up. In fact, this post is being written from Flock. Of course, feed reading is included as standard.
And of course, since Flock is based on Firefox, the list of good stuff must also include pretty much everything you like about Firefox as well.
What’s Bad?
For starters, Flock is beta software, and has already crashed on me once today. There are also other inconveniences, the biggest of which I have found so far is the lack of an OPML import feature, so if you have your blogroll on disk, you can’t import it to test out the feed reading capabilities. That’s a pity.
Apart from that, I think I just need to dedicate some time to getting to know the new Favorites feature before I can form an opinion, but it hasn’t been instant for me. I still don’t quite get the whole integration of bookmarks and feeds. To top it all off, there is a “starring” feature, which I suspect is similar to what GMail does, but again, the mish-mash of technologies is confusing at first.
Conclusion
Try it. It’s new and different enough to warrant half-an-hour of your time, just to see where browser technology is probably headed. It was even interesting enough to get me to blog about it! 