Flock 2 Beta: Firefox on Steroids
The goal behind Firefox was simple: a lightweight browser with the basics for a satisfying Web surfing experience, but the groundwork for a user to customize their feature set by installing add-ons. On the other end of the spectrum is Flock. Out of the box Flock can do just about everything you can imagine you might possibly (one day) use, and a little more.
The social web browser, as the Flock developers like to call it, can tie in to many major social Web 2.0 sites, including Facebook, Flickr, Digg, del.icio.us and YouTube. So that they weren’t left in the dust with the release of Firefox 3, the Mozilla Gecko-based Flock has pushed out a public beta of Flock 2, based on the latest Firefox engine. The new version packs all the feature, security and stability enhancements (well, mostly — more on that later) of Firefox 3 with the added social features. The Awesome Bar, the new favorites engine, the new password log handling — it’s all in there.
On top of all the Firefox goodies is the ability to see what your friends on any number of social sites are up to with message notifications right in the “people” sidebar. Another sidebar checks popular web-based e-mail clients, and another acts as a clipboard for anything on the Web, like links, text, and images.
Flock’s custom start page, called My World, is a sleek, customizable page where you can display a few headlines from your favorite RSS feeds, YouTube and Flickr media streams, and most visited sites. Flock handles RSS similarly to Safari, though feeds are selected from the sidebar with headlines shown in the body. With Flock you can save news stories by starring them, a feature I’ve longed for in Safari RSS. Another nifty feature is the media browser, which displays streams from YouTube and Flickr, giving users the ability to add their own from any site.
All these features seem to come at a price, though. Flock isn’t quite as zippy or as stable as Firefox 3. Crashes were a fairly common occurrence during my testing. I would also find myself feeling guilty when I’m only taking advantage of a fraction of Flock’s total feature set. And with all these functions, the interface and the Mac simplicity mentality gets overwhelmed with clutter. There are just too many buttons at the top of the window: one for sending a page via e-mail, one for Digging the page, one for installing a search engine (which cannot be removed). Really, in the rare instance I want to install the search engine from Ma.gnolia.com, I think I can manage to use a menu item.
Because this is a beta, the stability errors I ran into will likely be stomped out before the final version. This is only the first public beta, so we can even expect a few additional features before the next milestone. So if you like the all-in-one browser mentality and are a big user of everything Web 2.0, give the new Flock 2 beta a shot.
I used Flock for a while both on my old PC and on my mac. It really does a great job of integrating all of these Web 2.0 websites together into one interface.
However, as you said, it is a bit bloated and I ultimately stopped using it because the handful of features that I did use from it could be duplicated with Firefox extensions.