So I've spent 24 hours playing with the new beta for Flock. This is impressive by itself as every other time I've tried to use Flock it has been so horribly slow that I couldn't stand to keep using it.
I'm glad to say that for the first time, Flock is actually better to use than vanilla Firefox.
Flock is what they call "The Social Web Browser". It essentially adds a number of interesting features to Firefox. Many people say that Flock is basically Firefox with extensions, but it is more than that, it is an integrated set of tools for the browser.
The main additions that Flock brings are: integration with online bookmarks, integration with various social networks, built in webmail checker and built in blogging client.
The
online bookmark integration has always been my favorite feature. You can bookmark
any page by just pressing a big Star button. And if you double click it, you can specify
tags for del.icio.us (Or Magnolia, if that's your site). Once you have bookmarked
a site, whenever you do a search, it does a live search of Yahoo, your History and
your Bookmarks. I am constantly amazed at how often I search for something, and find
that I have already seen what I am looking for.
The social network integration gives you a new sidebar called the "People sidebar", it lists the latest updates from your contacts at your various sites. It is a lot like a built in twitter client, but it also works for Facebook, Flickr and Youtube.
The problem with this sidebar is that it doesn't update nearly as often as a dedicated Twitter client, so I always feel like I am missing updates. Also, its layout doesn't have room for an entire Tweet, so you have to hover over an update to see the whole post in the tooltip. I'm told that they are working on fixing this, perhaps when the final 1.1 update comes out, this will be fixed.
The webmail notifier is nice, but it also doesn't seem to update often enough. It takes a long time to notice that I have a new e-mail and that I have read the new e-mails.
The blogging client is also handy to have, but I am much happier in Windows Live Writer, as it feels like a much more fully featured client. I had too many weird HTML problems when working with Flock's editor.
To sum up: Flock adds a lot of nice features to Firefox. I wouldn't recommend it to the general public. But if you are a heavy social networking and blogging person, I definitely think you should give it a try.