I just came across a new browser called Flock, which bills itself as “the social web browser.” It runs on the Mozilla Gecko engine, so you get the same web standards compliant rendering as you do in Firefox.

What supposedly sets Flock apart is its ability to integrate with blogs. It can publish to most blogging services, including WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, and MySpace. (This post was blogged from Flock). Blogging is done in a pop-up window, although you can also set it to show the editor at the bottom of the browser (much like the Performancing extension in Firefox). There is integrated support for photo services such as Flickr, and it has a web clipboard that allows you to save text, images, and links for later inclusion in a blog. It has a number of other features of the social web, such as link sharing.

The browser is only at version 0.7 right now and it shows. Although this may someday be a great boon to blogging, right now it is more trouble than it is worth. The text editor requires you to insert a link between pieces of text. If you put the link at the place where you are currently typing, anything you type from that point forward is automatically part of the linked text. This can be fixed through the source editor, but it shouldn’t have to be. The pop-up window is always on top, which makes it hard to see the page below, which is a problem if you are blogging on something in that page.

A number of other problems also make switching to Flock questionable at this point. The bookmark toolbar appears only to accept individual links instead of folders. I like having all of my bookmarks available by group on the toolbar, but this can only be accessed from the Favorites menu. The integrated search feature also works in an odd way. Instead of selecting the engine and then typing your search string, you type the string and then select which engine you want to use from an automatic drop menu. This gets annoying if you are searching for a number of images in a row (for instance), as you have to select Google Image each time you type in new text. Also, because Flock is new, extensions are somewhat scarce, but since it is based on the Mozilla code, most Firefox extensions should be easy to adapt for Flock.

In short, this shows promise, but I am not ready to switch right now. Most of the blogging features are available in Firefox as extensions, and those that aren’t are often easier to do in Firefox without an extension. Some other bloggers out there might want to check this out, but I think I will stick with Firefox for now.

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