Tim Gaden15 June 2006, 3:05 AM
Flock, the heavily-buzzed social browser now has an official beta version, which allows you to upload batches of photos to photo sharing services, share your bookmarks with other people online and post and read blogs via a more powerful interface than traditional web browsers offer.
Flock is a "social" web browser that generated a lot of buzz last year.
Based on Firefox, it puts heavy emphasis on integrating your browsing experience with Web 2.0 services and apps like flickr, del.ico.us and PhotoBucket.
It looks much nicer than the default Firefox too:
A new beta release (0.7) brings some substantial new features.
Integration with flickr has improved with a new drag-n-drop photo interface that allows you to crop and rotate your photos before uploading them.
You can now mark particular photostreams as favourites and stay up-to-date with new images.
Its RSS handling has also been beefed up. A new feature, "My News", manages feed subscriptions, and allows you to quickly and easily read and save news articles. Firefox 2.0 has promised better RSS feed reading, but until it arrives, Flock is a big improvement on the basic "live bookmarks" capability of Firefox.
Flock includes a blogging editor that is now greatly improved. It uses the native Mozilla editor now and offers improved support for most major blogging platforms:
Tagging and favourites management are also improved.
It is still a beta; not everything works as expected (or at all!). I had trouble getting some of the extensions to play nicely, and the neat drag-n-drop drawer for text snippets and images in the blogging editor wouldn't take my pictures.
Still, it's a browser full of promise. You can read the release notes for 0.7 for a full run-down on the new features and find some known bugs at the end of a post on the Flock site, introducing the new release.
Or you can just jump right in and download the beta.