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Flock Developer Preview is out. Go grab it. But before you do, you might want to know what's so great about all this "new browser" everyone's talking about.

Just to make things clear, Flock hasn't launched yet... this is a preview of the final release, so i don't think it's correct to say "Flock Launched". Specially when they mention in their release notes:
We do not recommend that you use Flock 0.5 as your main web browser.

With that out of the way, let's move on.

What is Flock?

It's not a new browser, not literally, no. It's a Heavily Customized Firefox (isn't Open Source great?). It's built on top of a regular Firefox release with several improvements. It's called the Social Browser due to it's tight relationship with some socially centered websites out there, namely del.icio.us and flickr. Here's a list of the major features available in Flock.

• Bookmarks Manager publish your bookmarks directly to your account at del.icio.us. It's as easy as pushing a button sitting next to the address bar ("Star this page")
• Flickr Topbar A useful bar helps you fetch the photos published in any flickr account.
• Blog Manager Write a new post in your blog from within Flock.
• The Shelf Useful placeholder for stuff you might want to review/blog/link later. It's a sort of temporary storage for web content.
• RSS Integration On top of Firefox's features, it sports some cool improvements, like a fancy display of auto-discovered feeds. It also automatically caches feeds from Stared sites every hour.

It's still buggy and lacks some important features, such as importing bookmarks from Firefox and IE. But they're on to it. Firefox themes won't work in Flock, and neither will extensions. Either extensions developers start releasing Flock versions or the guys who built Flock have to think about a way to support Firefox extensions. From their What we don't: While we have ten or so of the most popular Firefox extensions working, we need to come up a way to make most Firefox extensions working in Flock and/or cajole extension authors to make their extensions work with Flock.. Check out the available extensions for Flock.

Now let's have a closer look at some of the features, shall we?

Bookmarks Manager

As you can see, it's very easy to add a bookmark to your del.icio.us account. You can configure Flock to either submit the url without any metadata – no tags, no description. the default option – or make it Star and Tag, which shows you the box shown in the picture above.

In the future, you'll be able to select your favourite social bookmarking service. So you're not stuck with del.icio.us, they've left the door open. Well, for now it's locked, but it should be open in the final release. Also, you're not storing the bookmarks solely on del.icio.us. It's redundantly stored in your computer, so if del.icio.us for some unforeseen reason fades away into oblivion, you'll still have your bookmarks. The good thing is that you'll always have your bookmarks backed up, anywhere you go.

RSS Feeds integration

First thing i noticed, the layout of the fancyfied version of the feeds is too big for 800x600. Is this on purpose? Is 800x600 incompatible with web2.0? Is this a bug?


This feature is probably the least interesting, since it's done by Safari and it's easily integrated in Firefox using Lektora, or integrated in the feed itself, using XSLT. Nothing new to see here. Moving On.

Flickr TopBar

Now we're talking! This little feature is amazingly useful. It's very quick to fetch some users photos. It's as fast as typing the username in that textbox and pressing the Get Photos button. For now, you have to know the username of your friends by heart to use this effectively, but i expect them to add a way to keep a list of users within the TopBar and navigate through their photos with a few clicks. Also, i'd think that they would have setup a toolbar button to bring up both Flickr and Blog TopBars with a click. But they haven't... maybe in a later version?


Just like the Favorites, you will also be able to choose your own Photo Sharing Service. Actually, you'll be able to keep more than one at the same time. Cool. I expect you'll be able to set it up with your account at Sapo Fotos, even if the development team have to build an API for that. I'm sure André and the team over at Sapo will do their best.

Blog TopBar

I'm not much of a fan of offline blogging clients, so this isn't exactly the hottest feature of Flock, IMO. Specially since i haven't implemented any XML-RPC API, but it might be useful to some, i'm sure. It currently supports Blogger, MetaWeblog, Moveable Type and Atom API. They have plans of including Livejournal and some more platforms. Stay tuned.

History/Favorites Searching

Handy little feature. If you have Google Desktop, you're covered, since making a search on Google will return results from your Browser History. With Flock, when you type a sentence in the Search Box, it searches your history and favorites to then present the results in a "Live Search" kind of way. Neat and useful.

It didn't allow me, however, to middle-click to open in new tabs. It seems to be a feature that's lacking pretty much everywhere on Flock's interface.

CSS parsing errors

One thing i noticed is that Flock's Javascript Console is much more verbose. It also outputs errors related to CSS parsing. Handy to debug your CSS files and help you make them valid.

It's showing a lot errors from within the Flock interface. Was this really ready for public appreciation, even if as a Developer Preview? I guess so. But not ready to public access. I'd expect a silent start-up, with invited beta testers, instead of this whole public binary download, with article on slashdot to boot.

Conclusions

I can't say much at the moment. It's still very fresh and incomplete. I'll want to see if i can hook this up with my Quickposts later on. Since i don't post that much photos to Flickr, the Flickr TopBar will be handy to see other people's photos. But all in all, it's a good extension of Firefox. If they can get beyond the issue of extension support, i'll probably move from Firefox. If i can bring my extensions over to Flock, i'll end up with an even more complete browser. As far as the title of The Browser for The Web 2.0 goes, i won't jump the gun and give it to Flock. Not yet.
Web2.0 != (del.icio.us && flickr)

But i'll tell you this much, it's a hell of a much better attempt at building something on top of Firefox than some previous endeavours. Oh, but flock.com's layout pretty much sucks. I'd expect something more... professional. Maybe they were aiming at a basic layout, similar to del.icio.us. Whatever it is, it isn't gasp-at-first-sight, that's for sure.

I didn't mention it earlier, but i was suspicious that the logo could have been created by the great Jon Hicks – the man behind the Mozilla logos (firefox and thunderbird) and also the creator of the tasteful StyleMaster logo and icons – but i was wrong. Jon himself cleared it up through a comment at PaulStamatiou.com. The creator is Bryan Bell. Great job Bryan.