The Firefox web browser is so ubiquitous today that we sometimes forget that it is open source. Open source means more than simply “free”. It means that the source code which makes up the program is freely available to other programmers to play around with. The end result often means program spin-offs. Flock is one such spin-off.

I went and downloaded the Mac version of Flock 1.0 and installed it to my Mac Pro (there are, of course, versions available for Windows and Linux as well). How does it stack up? Is this thing worth using instead of Firefox?

The Browser Itself

When you open up Flock, you at first notice one thing: this is Firefox only sexier. The boxy, boring theme of Firefox has been replaced with a much more sleek and rounded interface. Not so much to be stupid, but enough to make it look good. In fact, it actually reminded me of Internet Explorer 7 to a degree. Bookmarks have even been renamed to “Favorites” inside of Flock, which is just like IE. But, don’t get me wrong. This is certainly not IE. The browser is actually pretty snappy as well. All the features of Firefox are here, but it seems to actually run a little quicker than does Firefox.

The first page which loads is “My World”. This is an internal page at the address “about:myworld”. That address tells me that this is programmed right into the browser. “My World” provides easy access to most recently accessed bookmarks, a basic RSS feed reader showing headlines on screen, a “Favorite Media” area showing me some photos from Flickr, along with a bunch of shortcuts to browser features.

Bookmarks (now named Favorites) have the ability to add tags to each one as well as built-in capability of syncing your bookmarks with an online aggregator like Del.icio.us. The favorites are divided into Local and Online, so you can view those you have stored locally to Flock and online in your account. That’s cool, I must say.

One of the most important things for me, too, was whether it would run my favorite Firefox add-ons. Foxmarks is the big one for me so that I can share bookmarks among multiple machines. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with Flock. That is very disappointing. While the add-on did install and says that it synced with Flock, none of my bookmarks appeared in the browser. That was very perplexing. I know I can sync using Del.icio.us, but that does not have the flexibility of Foxmarks.

The Social Web Browser

I’m not making that up – that is how Flock markets itself. The idea is that the browser is built on top of Firefox, but it is given a slew of features which make it useful to digital social butterflies. In fact, I can see why this browser used to be called “the Web 2.0 browser”. Flock has built in features to help you work easily with the likes of Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Twitter, various blogging platforms and online bookmark aggregators like Del.icio.us or Magnolia. So, while the traditional web browser just waits for you to type in a URL and hit Enter, the Flock web browser does that while also making it easy to be omnipresent on the web and keep tabs on what’s going on at a glance.

To test it, I set up Flock to work with the profiles that I had. First, I set up the Twitter account. It directed me to Twitter to log into my profile. After doing so, the people that I follow on Twitter appeared in my “People” sidebar in Flock. Works well for what it is, but I actually didn’t care for it. It would display each of the people I follow and their latest tweet. I would much rather have it display the latest tweets in chronological order. Unfortunately there was no way to configure any options for it, and there was no built-in way to post to Twitter except for being directed to the Twitter site.

Next, I went over to Facebook and logged in there. Flock detected the login and offered to bring the information into the People sidebar. I allowed it and next I had the statuses of my Facebook friends available in Flock. The sidebar has a little “1″ in it which, when clicked, took me to my Facebook inbox. So, aside from seeing your friends’ statuses, you can easily follow what is happening with your Facebook profile, including updating your status, watching for messages, pokes, group invites, etc. Like the Twitter sidebar, the Facebook integration is fairly basic. For example, I cannot follow the the news feed for my profile nor do any Facebook apps integrate with Flock. I could, of course, subscribe to the Facebook feed using the built-in RSS reader, but it would make more sense to me to bundle that with the Facebook sidebar.

The Media Bar is another feature of Flock which, when enabled, appears at the top of the browser window (under the address bar). This bar allows you to follow Flickr photos, photos from your Facebook friends, Youtube videos, etc. The way to add “media streams” to Flock is by having it detect the stream when surfing the site. For example, I went over to Flickr and started surfing around. Flock kept notifying me that it had detected new media streams. Essentially, this is just an RSS feed reader for multimedia sites which allows you to view the content. The interface for the media bar is pretty slick. You can scroll through the images and/or videos. With images, hovering over the image will give you a larger preview of it. For videos, clicking on it will take you to the site (i.e. Youtube) to view the video.

Web Clipboard & Blogging

While many of the features of Flock seem to be glorified feed readers with some integration into various social media sites, Web Clipboard and the integrated blogging support actually seem pretty useful. When you have the Web Clipboard open in Flock, you can drag and drop anything from a website into the clipboard. It adds the item to the clipboard kind of like a mini-file, allowing you to access it later on from the sidebar. So, for example, I drag and image from a site into the web clipboard and that photo appears in the sidebar. If I highlight a selection of text on a site, I can similarly drag it to the web clipboard. In both cases, the item is titled (either by the image’s ALT tag or the title of the website) and I am given links for viewing, blogging or deleting the item. Which leads me to…

Blogging. Flock supports integrated blogging with Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJounal, Typepad, Wordpress.com, Xanga and a self-hosted blog. Since I have a few Wordpress-powered blog sites (including PCMech), I set it up using the self-hosted option. I plug in the URL to the blog. It detects the blog software then asks for my author username and password. That entered, it is done. Now, when I am surfing the net, I can right-click anything and select “Blog This” to write a blog post. Similarly, I can blog any item in my web clipboard. The blog editor is not as full-featured as the one I have in Wordpress, but it is enough to get the job done. Also, under the configuration button in the blog editor, I see that I can apparently add more than one blog site.

Conclusions

I like the Flock browser, but not enough at this point to ditch Firefox. The integration with various social media sites is cool, but it would be cooler for somebody who actually frequented those sites. I am not one of those people. I do like the integrated web clipboard and blogging capability. I do like the fact that it integrates well with online social bookmarking sites, but I am disappointed that Foxmarks didn’t work. If it is based on the same engine, I would think Foxmarks would work fine.

Overall, Flock is a nice, polished alternative to Firefox suitable for today’s digital social butterfly. It provides tools that are ideal for working with multiple social networks. However, I would not say that Flock is an ideal web browser for today’s power user. The actual Firefox browser means you can work with the entire library of add-ons, whereas Flock can only work with some of them. While I am not going to switch to Flock, I am definitely going to monitor this product because I see some really good promise in this web browser.