At Home with John and Debbie

Flock is sort of a new browser, but sort of not. It’s Mozilla Firefox in some new clothes, but it does some interesting things. Considering this is release 0.5pre, and you have to click through umpteen warnings about how buggy to expect things to be, it seems unexpectedly stable.

There are quite a few features for blogging, which I’m sure will upset those who see blogging as just a means for adolescents to clog up the Web with their meanderings. Essentially this means there’s a WYSIWYG blog item editor and some stuff to make it easy to link and quote web content in blog items.

The most interesting bit for me, though, is the complete rehaul of bookmarks and history. Bookmarks are called “favourites” (like in IE) but the user interface is very different, very easy, very tag oriented (like Picasa and Gmail) and manageable. Favourites synchronise with del.icio.us.

Browsing history, brilliantly, has been Google-ified. Every time you visit a page, its text content is indexed by Flock. Type into the search bar, wait a fraction of a second, and it will give you a list of pages from your favourites and your history which contain what you typed.

Then, you can either arrow down to the page you want, to load it, or hit enter to go to a search engine in the conventional manner. This is wonderful.

There’s also some integration with Flickr, and some clever handling of RSS feeds. The RSS handling doesn’t seem to remember whether you’ve read an item. Since my main use for RSS is to get notified of new content, that’s a shame. I’m sure it will come.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 21st, 2005 at 13:28 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.