You know, the current crop of web browsers really do have it all wrong. The web is an increasingly interactive medium, yet the big 4 browsers (Safari, Firefox, Knoquerer, oh and that IE thing from Microsoft) all treat it as a one way medium. You navigate to a page, then sit back and watch/read. They don’t take into account that there are websites out there that let you interact with your friends. They ignore the fact that some of us like to blog. They seem completely oblivious to the reality that many people like to store their bookmarks online, not locally on their hard disk.
When Flock was first announced I have to admit that I just didn’t get it. Flock is billed as the world’s first Social Web Browser and at the time I first heard about it it sounded like a really stupid idea.
Flock 1.0 was recently released and it’s proved my initial opinions completely wrong. In fact, it’s changed the way I browse. On my Macs now Flock is the browser of choice, and after only a couple of days of using it, I can’t imagine going back to anything else.
I used to rely on two browsers to do all my work. If I needed to show something off, I’d use Safari. Web applications on Safari look great. For development work I’d reluctantly turn to Firefox, simply because of all the extensions available for FireFox for developers to make their lives easier. FireFox though is a resource intensive application that eats memory and processor almost as fast as it eats HTML.
Flock has replaced them both. It looks great. It uses the Firefox engine to parse and render, making it blisteringly fast. Even better, it only uses a fraction of the memory and processor time of Firefox, making it ideal for a developer like me that has a ton of applications open most of the time.
The social aspects come into play when you start to browse. I have Twitter and Facebook accounts, and the moment I logged into them Flock happily told me that it supports them and can do ’stuff’ with them. I clicked a link to let Flock do it’s thing then instantly saw a sidebar appear showing me summaries of everything my friends have been up to in those systems. At any point now I can just click on the people icon, log in, and get live updates of my friends while I browse.
I logged onto the company blog to make a post last night and a similar thing happened. Flock asked me if I wanted it to know about my TypePad account. I answered yes and now when I want to make a blog post I just click on the quill icon on the toolbar and I can start blogging, right from within my browser without having to navigate anywhere special.
Flock is also smart about content and features of web apps. Any page with an RSS feed causes Flock to remind you that it has really cool RSS handling features. Any site you visit with a search box causes Flock to ask if you want to add the site to it’s search tools. Think about that for a second. You can go to your corporate portal and add its search facilities right to Flock so that you can instantly search that site from whereever you are, just by typing into the search box at the top right of the window. Flock also ships with support for a number of key online systems, such as ebay, letting you conduct live searches right from the browser’s search bar across a bunch of search engines and other sites quickly and easily, complete with previews of the search results.
I’ve only really started to scratch the surface of what Flock can do in the short time I’ve been using it, but I have no qualms about adopting it as my browser of choice on every single computer I come into contact with. Click on the button at the top of this post to go and get Flock yourself.
