As far as new browsers go it’s difficult for me to get excited about them because there are so many out there but lately I’ve been impressed by two different browsers. First was Opera which went free after being a pay or ad-supported browser. I didn’t expect I’d care much for that but have been using it every day since I downloaded it. Opera is well worth downloading and fitting into the Firefox / IE mix.

And now comes Flock which is based on Mozilla. My inital thoughts were that Flock would be just another overhyped bloated Firefox wannabe because it carried most the telltale signs: teasing private beta that only allowed a few of the usual suspects who say practically everything new is awesome, contained social networking tools, etc.

Glad to write that I was wrong. At least as a blogger I was wrong. I’m not sure how many non-blogger users will be ready for the Flock experience.

One of the devs, Bart, explains how and why Flock wasn’t just an extension:

In architecting our software, build systems and engineering processes, we have given considerable thought to how our code will be able to evolve alongside the Mozilla code, without forking it. We are trying to pay particular attention to this in areas where we are doing things slightly different from Firefox. For example, in the area of bookmarks, we implemented on top of the Firefox bookmarks architecture, while integrating social bookmarks.

The Flock team released a very early bleeding edge version — with source code — and comes packaged with some very promising and different built-in browser features. Yes, it crashed within 5 minutes of using some of those features, so might want to put this one on a test system only, but they aren’t saying this thing is even a stable beta yet, but a developer preview (readers that aren’t developers might want to wait for a true preview release).

Now what makes Flock different than Firefox, IE and Opera? The primary different feature I saw was a built-in blogging client. Flock attempts to make blogging and tagging a part of the browsing experience.

Integrated blogging - by clicking a feather icon a special blogging window will appear that you can drag and drop images or URLs into. I ran a test of this blogging window in the last post saving to draft.

Setting up posting to my Wordpress (WP) powered blogs was easy: just put in the blog URL and Flock searches for the xmlrpc script to interact via MetaWeblog API. You will also need to supply a username and password to be able to post. The add blog process worked good with Wordpress. I tried using Blogger, which by supplying one user/pass will automatically add all your blogger-based blogs to the account tab, but Flock crashed when it tried to retrieve my recent blogger posts. I didn’t test a Typepad blog, but it’s supposed to work with those simiarly. Bloggers will like this system once the gremlins are ironed out for an official release, but I wouldn’t add too many accounts or too much information to it just yet.

As for using the built-in blogging system? That’s also well designed with an semi-adjustable window (the form input fields stay the same size, but users can manipulate the width of the parent window). There is a button labeled “TOPBAR” which will show recent posts for whatever account is selected. I liked having the ability to click and drag any image I see from the browser or from my desktop.

Tag bookmarks in del.icio.us - whenever you tag or bookmark something in Flock you can have it automatically tagged to your del.icio.us account (sure, everybody has them, right?) which is handy. You’ll have to enter in your user/pass each time you start Flock, but this is a hany feature. Could it have been done as a Firefox extension? Probably, but it’s the kind of thing that is cool to have built-in. I would also like to be able to send/tag to Yahoo MyWeb and Furl.

I noticed that when I bookmarked Flock, it automatically added the Flock homepage and Flock start page to my tags at del.icio.us. I also noticed that 1,300+ other people, as of this writing, had done the same. That’s a smart way for Flock to get get to the front of the line in the popular page under the tags: “flock” and “flock start.” I guess for those devs wanting to get their software noticed on del.icio.us, just include this functionality? Smart. (Update: this is a bug that has been fixed for the next version, indicates solutionwatch)

Submit Flock Bug Report
Help Flock get more stable by reporting bugs here (I did)

Join Flockstars Mailing List
Using Mailman, Flock has a mailing list.

This is only developer version 0.4.8, I am curious to see what Flock does next. Their list of incomplete features is long. For those of us who enjoy tagging and blogging Flock seems like a browser designed for us.

For those more interested in the user experience, Flock isn’t really all that different from Firefox or Opera. Yeah, there is a built-in RSS aggregator that breaks down items by date but that’s not anything all that revolutionary or new.

Overall, though, I was impressed with what I’ve seen so far. A good start. Bloody good start.

What others are blogging about Flock
Dion has a good idea for a future feature: blog a browsing session
Chris Pirillo wonders why his service gada.be isn’t included in the default search?
Tom Rafferty from Ireland has “mixed feelings about it” This one is more about what is to come, Tom, I think then what is already there.
Scoble: “I really like using this browser.”

Update 9:05am: I’m adding and updating what I’m reading other bloggers are saying at the end of this post. I don’t typically read too much of what other bloggers say about new products/services first before writing my own opinion so that I don’t become tainted. I do the same thing with movies, books, games and other reviews. I’ll read the other reviews after making my own opinion. Sometimes this makes me look like the lone voice in the crowd liking something that others hate, but it keeps my opinion pure. FYI for those who are using aggregators which do not update modified posts, you might miss some information on some posts at Hmm.

• Singing a little Opera 9 beta 2 with widgets and Flock beta 1
• Testing posting from the Flock blogging window
• Review: A bit clumsy and awkward hovering with Cooliris
• Create an Opera RSS feed widget without any programming knowledge
• Opera goes free — banners and licensing begone!
• Opera to sing a new version in February