Flock has landed
The much awaited Flock web browser, based on Firefox, has released its 0.5 beta preview to the public. Got a copy myself and I’m trying it out. I’m not yet ready to use this as my primary browser because, well, it’s still buggy (according to the developers themselves)–something expected of a beta release. Wait, I’m using Firefox 1.5 beta 2 as my primary browser, aren’t I?
My initial observations (updated as of October 21st):
- Interface is very much like Firefox, only with some superficial enhancements. Firefox users should be comfortable with the interface, which includes the keyboard and context menu shortcuts.
- It has a built-in RSS reader (or at least it’s supposed to–it doesn’t work well with my installation), very much like Safari. It’s not an RSS aggregator, though, as it will only switch to viewing the RSS feed of the page you’re currently reading. But very useful, nonetheless, if you prefer reading content only (off with those ads!
- )
- It has built-in use of the del.icio.us API. So you can share your bookmarks across the web out-of-the-box.
- It incorporates the APIs (XML-RPC or Atom or whatever else) of several blogging software so you can blog directly from the browser.
- Drag-and-drop multimedia capabilities
- Textarea is automatically converted into a rich-text editor. Add this to the drag-and-drop capability, and you have interesting blogpost editing capabilities.
- It seems slow on my machine.
I will be road testing this baby and see what else it has to offer.
Update, as of October 21st:
If you want to try it out for yourself, visit the download page at http://www.flock.com/developer/download/preview and use the following username and password combination: caveat / emptor. Versions for Windows, Mac and Linux are available. But be warned that Flock is still only in beta/preview release. So if your machine goes bonkers or blows up for some reason, we can’t blame it on them, can we?
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