Flock was the much-hyped "Web 2.0" browser which had some real hype surrounding it a few months ago when it was launched. Since then, it’s died down a little bit, but the people at Flock have continued to work on it.

Flock 0.7 is based off the Firefox 1.5 codebase. Essentially, it’s Firefox 1.5 with a few extra features and "social web" features. The first public beta of Flock is just around the corner. I thought I’d download and try out the Flock 0.7 Milestone 11 build.

Last October I reviewed Flock 0.5 – the developer preview. 

First Run

On the first run of Flock, you’re provided with a wizard which walks you through setting up Flock. The wizard sets up your del.icio.us account, flickr account, finds out what kind of news you like and sets up your newspaper and installs Macromedia Flash.

On first run, Flock looks a bit like this:

I noticed that the theme of Flock 0.7 has been slightly updated though I still prefer the Winstripe Mozilla theme.

Where’s the "Finish" button?

I tried out Flock’s bookmarking feature. I starred and tagged a page and it didn’t appear on my del.icio.us page. I don’t know whether I did something wrong or not, but it confused me.

Flock’s bookmarks don’t seem to be much better than the Firefox 3.0 "Places" feature. 

Newspaper

In the installation, Flock asks you what kind of news you like. Based on that, it seems to populate your RSS feed list with a few feeds. Using the feeds, it generates a "newspaper".

Searching

I believe the quick searching was in Flock 0.5 too but I must admit I really like it. As you type, the results appear on the dropdown menu. It experiences the same problem as early Firefox 2.0 builds – it doesn’t autocomplete what you’re typing. 

It was unfortunate that the Yahoo! search results often took quite a while to load which ruined the experience a bit. It’s nice having the search results from Google, Amazon and Wikipedia just a click away.

Web Snippets

Flock 0.5′s "Shelf" feature has been redesigned and is now called "Web Snippets". It exists as an icon in the status bar which when clicked expands to show the snippets and docks to the bottom of the browser window.

It’s kinda nice but doesn’t really do much besides replicating the operating system’s clipboard feature.  This feature has certainly improved since Flock 0.5 and is a ton easier to use and more useful.

Thoughts

Flock 0.7 is a big improvement over Flock 0.5. It looks nicer, feels more polished and is easier to use.

Still, I don’t think Flock is the browser for me. Flock does add a blog editor and quick access to del.icio.us and flickr but Flock’s implementation isn’t much better than accessing the actual website.

For a few extra features, you sacrifice the extensions you can get in Firefox and the even cooler stuff in Firefox 2.0.