Released on October 14, 2008, Flock 2.0 is by far the best browser ive seen to date. Based around the Mozilla CodeBase and now incorporating Firefox 3 this is a serious contender for the Best Browser Award.
Designed as a self styled 'Social Media & Web2.0 Browser' Flock 2.0 comes with numerous 'Social Media' & 'web2.0' tools to make your life eaiser. Whats more i actual feel it help define what exactly 'Web2.0' is, as it quite uniquely brings all your popular Social Media applications and websites into well considered tool bars and sidebars.
Simply by visiting and logging into the likes of MySpace, Flickr, Twitter etc, your account is automatically added to the browser and grouped appropriately. This means you can check the status of all your friends from Facebook & Twitter, whilst uploading images to your Flickr account all from one place.
Likewise the media panel allows you to access and search the likes of YouTube & Flickr, or even log in to your Gmail account.
Its all so easy and well organised. Ok, so it doesnt include every single Web2.0 service but it does cover the main players, with more to be added soon. It does however also include a Blog Editor, which when selected opens a new window, so you can type a new entry whilst researching the subject in the normal browser window.
The great thing with this feature is that its just as easy to use a non standard Blog such as BlogEngine.Net as it is to use the more common Blogger or LiveJournal. Not to mention in some instances the inbuilt Blog editor actually adds functionality to your blogging by adding Technorati Tags in addition to the inbuilt Blog system tags.
With this being built around FireFox 3 you are still able to use a lot of the FireFox add-ons, whilst also taking advantage of those specificly for Flock. Unfortunately the later are a little sparse at present, and the Flock 'Addons' link only takes you to the Flock specific download area. But this will improve with time and user uptake.
There is probably so much more which i have yet to discover with this browser. One neat feature i only just discovered is that if you go to the Google.com homepage ad type a search term into the search box, Flock actually uses AJAX to give you suggestions and the approximate number of results. Nice! I Like!
Tags: SocialMedia, Flock, Web Browser, FireFox, Web 2.0, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr, GMail, AJAX, Technorati, YouTube