Flock, the social web-browser

I decided to give the hyped up web browser Flock a try today. I have seen it promoted at many tech-conferences/ expositions that I have been to and a majority of the developers are based here in Victoria, British Columbia where I am now.

When I fired it up, I was asked if I wanted to import my preferences from Firefox (Bookmarks, History, Add-ons and more) which I kindly accepted and waited about a minute for all to come into flock. I then was greeted with a nice getting started window which taught me a few things on configuring my various cloud accounts. There was also a “My World” page which you can configure with feeds, friend activity, media and various other addable widgets.

I instantly set up my WordPress account like this: I was told to go to WordPress.com and login. Once that finished it told me that my account had been stored in it’s database and now I can click on the feather icon from the Flock tool-bar and post from an innovative dialog.

This dialog relieves me from the new WordPress update and lets me do everything I could normally do from the “write post” tab in WordPress (in HTML and WYSIWYG). It also adds some of the icons from WordPress to make it more friendly to common users.

Enough with that; I’ll now tell you about Flock’s main tool-bars. I guess I’ll talk about the navigational tool-bar. You’ll firstly notice the big star for bookmarking sites, it reminds me of Firefox three’s new way of bookmarking things. Next the joined back and forward buttons and the home button.

In the address entry area on the left you’ll see three buttons, the first to view media streams (if any) on the current page. The second is for obtaining a feed to the current site and the third is to add a search engine to your list on an applicable site.

At the right side of the address entry enclosure, you’ll see an option to send a link of the current site via e-mail to a friend or contact if you like it. Moving down is the Flock tool-bar with links to the various areas in the sidebar (must have added an account to flock to use most of them) and then the bookmarks to the left of that.

The whole thing reminds me of OSX very much with the blue and silver shine; but in another way, is completely different than anything else I’ve seen. The colours are well chosen (the sidebar looks great) and everything is well wrapped over a normal installation of Firefox (so all Firefox’s features too; like spell checking).

I believe this is a great browser and I enjoy the little additions to everything. I have added a link in my sidebar if you haven’t already seen and am making this my default web browsing application (although sometimes the text rendering is iffy, and the buttons (or widgets) are ugly in Linux (I’m sure the fix I used for Firefox will work here)). I hope you have fun with this, and spread it around.

Download Flock:
http://www.flock.com/

Best,
nikoPSK

~ by nikopsk on April 12, 2008.