13 steps

There’s a new browser in town, sort of. It’s called Flock, and it’s supposed to be the next great thing.
So is it? Well… yes and no.

Looks familiar doesn’t it? It should (aside from the borders, that’s my Windows XP theme), it’s Firefox. What they’ve done is taken the Fox source code and started building on that, which is cool, the more the merrier. That’s part of what’s Open Source is all about after all.
But what’s new then?
Well, they’ve taken a look around at all the Web 2.0 services floating around (Web 2.0, I still crack myself up every time I use that, mmm buzzwords) and integrated them into the browser.
So if you have a blog somewhere you can just add the account details to Flock and you can write blog entries while browsing. Hardly earth shattering thusfar but they’ve done the same thing with Flickr for pics, del.icio.us for bookmarks, making it all work together seamless (in theory). Check out their startpage for 13 things you can do with Flock to see what else they’ve added.

The version I’ve tried is the 0.5 developer preview release and I must say it looks nice. RSS support seems a bit wonky at moment and I can imagine a few other things to make it all a bit smoother, for example it’d be sweet if you could use the drop box to also upload pics and other files from your comp, but let’s wait for the 1.0 release for now.
I don’t think I’ll be switching any time soon, aside from the fact that it can’t import your Firefox settings even though it’s a Firefox clone, which seems a bit odd. I’ll just stick with the Fox and some extra extensions which offer much, if not more of the same functionality. Plus I still prefer to host my own blog, my own gallery and pretty soon my own online bookmark manager over using someone else’s service.

But to each his own.

Grab your own copy here.