First look at Flock

I posted about Flock a little over a month ago and wondered if it would be the first Web 2.0 browser. I downloaded the first pre-alpha-developer release today after getting an email about it and so far it’s looking pretty interesting. This is definitely not a release for the faint of heart—it crashes early and often—but I see a lot of promise here.

Flock uses the Mozilla codebase, so much of the interface is familiar to anyone who uses Firefox or any of its cousins. What’s different is the way it leverages Web services. The first thing I noticed is that Flock doesn’t use traditional bookmarks, but hooks into your Delicious account (my bookmarks) and displays those instead. I gave up on traditional bookmarks long ago so this is a welcome change.

Clicking the star next to the browser’s location bar pops up a dialog that allows you to tag and post the current page to your Delicious account. That’s it. Bookmarks stored on a local computer hard drive are officially obsolete.

It’s also possible to hook Flock to your blog so you can post right from the browser. That doesn’t sound so different from logging in to your blogging site like you do now until you see it integrated with Flickr to make posting a photo as easy as drag and drop.

There are versions available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. Head over to the developer page to check out some more documentation, a FAQ, and the discussion forums.