Date: 11/21/05 (Mozilla)    Keywords: rss, browser, security, web

Has anyone tried out Flock yet? It is still quite beta, if not alpha, based on Mozilla Firefox, but incorporating some very nice little innovations indeed.
1. All of your Favourites/Bookmarks/Whatever you call them are stored online, by default on del.icio.us . There is even a little star button on the toolbar to bag and tag any page you are on quickly and easily.
2. You can use your Favourites Manager in the normal, everyday boring way. Or you can also use it as an RSS feed reader. Blow me down with a feather.
3. "Flock comes with the open source Clucene search engine built in. Each time you visit a web page, it indexes all the content on that page so you can easily retrace your steps later." Exactly what that means I don't quite know yet. Any techno-babble people want to help me out here?
4. Most frequently visited sites tracking from within favourites. Real, intelligent Favourite Favourites?
5. When you bookmark a page that has a feed, the browser automatically becomes a feed reader and updates every hour.
6. Flock has a built in blog editor that works with WordPress, Movable Type, Typepad, and Blogger. Unfortunately LJ support is expected "shortly".
7. The blog editor integration looks pretty good. You can highlight something on a webpage, right click and choose "Blog this". It will automagically open the editor, with the selection already inserted and formatted.
8. The Blog Editor comes with Flickr integration. Press a button and get a topbar with all your Flickr photos. Assuming you have Flickr of course.
9. An intriguing, very alpha feature, called "The Shelf". Basically if you want to blog about something cool, but you're too busy reading other stuff, you drag stuff onto the shelf so you can drag it into the editor later. It's 'Ron for the net.

Definitely not ready for prime time yet, but with the news from this (badly in need of a spell-checker) article that Firefox are going to be slower at innovating, whilst maintaining speedy responses to security threats and aiming for the most intuitive interface possible, COMBINED with the fact that this is built off of Firefox, and therefore should be able to tap into the wealth of extensions out there quite easily, it is well worth a look.

EDIT: Not quite alpha, not quite beta. That weird stage of in between. Public Beta is slated for December.

Source: http://www.livejournal.com/community/mozilla/337865.html