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Another way to satisfy the unholy lust is to try Flock. It runs on OSX, and has native bookmark sharing with support for the popular bookmark sharing sites.

Anyone remember Flock? Totally magical! Will change the way you browse the web! Will shine your shoes and feed your cat!

Or not. It's essentially Firefox plus some random blog-editing tools and a "pretty" interface. Songbird, IMHO, will be much the same. So far the only feature that people like is the "URL Slurper"... which basically amounts to wget recursively. Don't get me wrong... I'm all for competition, especially when it's Open-Source vs. Closed-Source. That said, I can't see much worth getting hyped up about: the interface is nothing new (but more cluttered than iTunes), the "URL Slurper" isn't anything the world hasn't seen with wget and curl, and I think the project might be at risk legally.

The optimist in me will make sure I download and try it the first day that it's available. The pessimist reminds me that getting hyped up will make me less receptive to a good product.

I think they call it 'Flock.'
Here they go, picking on Flock...
I use Flock, it's ok. They have not released another mildstone build since 0.4.10, and I did try one of the "hourly" builds, and gave up on it. I am suprised that 0.4.10 works as well as it does. Both Flock and Firefox take more time to boot up than Opera on older boxes, so I often use Opera when I am in a hurry. I would like to see another release of Flock, and see what they can come up with. The blog setup is great, although one can use Opera or Firefox to maintain a blog just as well, or maybe better in some cases. I have all four browsers in my knoppix remaster (Firefox,Opera,Flock,Konqueror) and it's fun to move from computer to computer with the livecd and try them out. On a machine with broadband, I can quickly set up an hourly Flock build in ramdisk, and see what it can do.
All I have to do is delete the /home/knoppix/.mozilla/flock folder to get a clean Flock setup. That's the advantage of a livecd, no harm done. On a 256 MB box, I have only 6% ramdisk useage according to "df", so there is plenty of room to run Flock there.

Organizer -> PDA -> Remote-working solution

Web browser -> Web 2.0 browser -> Porn-harvesting solution

Outhouse -> Toilet -> Food-egestion solution

Icebox -> Refrigerator -> Provisions temperature-control solution

At this rate, in 20 years we will hear about "illicit purveyors of reality-altering solutions" roaming our streets -- or "vehicle-transport infrastructure solutions," if you prefer.

With all the recent hype surrounding the new social web browser Flock, I thought I'd take a second to let everyone know about the other social web browsing experence, Flocq. While not yet as polished as Flock, Flocq is growing rapidly with only 4 total hours from idea to code to qa to public launch. Check out Flocq at http://flocq.100free.com/

for those of you asking what the hype is all about. here's what we've got so far that's different in Flock:

1. replaces old-school bookmarks with one-click social bookmarking to Del.icio.us
2. tagging is there if you want to do two-click bookmarking and tag
3. a new bookmarks manager with an integrated rss reader
4. built in search engine that indexes every page you visit and has a Spotlight-style as-you-type UI
5. keeps a list of the sites you visit most frequently
6. multiple bookmarks toolbar (one for work, one for play etc.)
7. finds feeds, lets you view them
8. caches the feeds so you can read them on the train
9. aggregated RSS view for all of your bookmarks folders
10. integrated blog editor (support wordpress, movable type, blogger)
11. one click 'blog this' feature (it does the blockquotes, citations and all that stuff for you)
12. Flickr integration (drag and drop pix into blogs)
13. shelf: a web scrapbook that helps you organizae stuff you want to blog

and of course it's open source and cross platform.

details at http://www.flock.com/fiveways/togetstarted/13.php

extensions will still work with flock: http://extend.flock.com/ so otherwise it's the same thing as firefox, except some guys have spent some time doing some hardcore dev work to integrate some pretty cool extensions seamlessly so they're less of an ugly bolt-on and the whole thing has some cohesion. it's eye candy, right? with some useful widgets. if the gnome candy boys could get with the kde widget boys like these flock guys have gone with firefox, maybe we'd have a decent linux desktop. but hell the way people whinge you wonder why they bother...

it's a developer preview, so we don't have a lot of product overview-style stuff, but if you go to either the Developer Section or the Community Section, the first link ("Get Started") takes you to a couple of documents that provide an overview, including screenshots. The URL is http://www.flock.com/fiveways/togetstarted/.

...to link to the web browser in question.

If they hadn't gone with the boneheaded idea of making the main page's body text ridiculously oversized, I don't think people would be complaining about the design much at all. Again, look at the "About" page.

http://www.flock.com/home/about/

Yes, there are still design issues -- the headline is still a little too big, and there's not enough space between it and the start of the body -- but the font choice and colors are hardly eye-destroying.

At any rate, this is sort of tangential to the main point I was trying to make. :)

It's great that we're seeing continued internet growth, but one thing that the article failed to mention was that the quality of the internet sites was also on the rise in 2005.

For example, behold the recently created website for the Flock browser.

Brace yourselves and be prepared to witness true innovation.

http://www.flock.com/

Another hint: Bart Decrem is part of the Flock team and was also part of Eazel

Screenshot of Flock 0.2

Apparently Flock also has a Digg-style service on their site.

You can check it out by signing up or by using the following account info to login:

username: slashdot
password: slashdot

Here are two screenshots of above mentioned Digg-style service that they call "Breadcrumbs."

Screenshot of Flock 0.2

Apparently Flock also has a Digg-style service on their site.

You can check it out by signing up or by using the following account info to login:

username: slashdot
password: slashdot

Here are two screenshots of above mentioned Digg-style service that they call "Breadcrumbs."

No, they just commented out the links on the first page.

Links to subpages:
Home
About
Download
Extensions

No, they just commented out the links on the first page.

Links to subpages:
Home
About
Download
Extensions

No, they just commented out the links on the first page.

Links to subpages:
Home
About
Download
Extensions

No, they just commented out the links on the first page.

Links to subpages:
Home
About
Download
Extensions

According to their download page "[You can] [e]xpect Flock to crash and, from time to time, lose all your data. ... And things will never be the same."

They're actually pirating FireFox.

In all seriousness, though, it's a bunch of FireFox developers who're whacking FireFox into a new form.

http://beta.flock.com/user/signup ?

Their site and logo is actually a direct rip off of 37signals. Everything from the dorky oversized fonts to the pastel colors and highlighting.

Even the logos! Flock's logo vs. 37signal's logo. Shameless.

Here's another example.

Flock vs. 37signals

Amazing.

Their site and logo is actually a direct rip off of 37signals. Everything from the dorky oversized fonts to the pastel colors and highlighting.

Even the logos! Flock's logo vs. 37signal's logo. Shameless.

Here's another example.

Flock vs. 37signals

Amazing.

http://beta.flock.com/user/signup no karma

Well, all I can say is that if the web site is any indicator of the design talents of its creators, I don't hold much hope for the "swiss army knife" of browsers.

First most obvious question to me is, will it run on Linux? No mention in the article, and their web site is coy (and a little annoying in its design). It does mention "cross platform tastiness", and "written in java", so I'm hoping.

That said, my biggest worry is browser extensions that start relying on non-standard implementation, i.e., they begin to have affinity for things not-html, not-javascript, things not-css. I know the browser universe is a hodge-podge of standards already, I just would hate to see yet another trailblazer that ends up to be some extension of some proprietary idea.

Anyway, to the new browser and its team, welcome to our flock. Best of luck.

Web applications have particular characteristics in that they tend to run within a web-browser and use particular sets of technologies for both GUI, data representation and communication. But it is not necessarily the only or even the best way. There is a difference between deploying MS Office local to one machine or running it across a network with the documents on another remote fileserver. Many applications, although installed locally will update versions or load new plugin functionality across the net. The administrator must make many judgements on what characteristics they want including performance, maintainability, security, remote access, user training etc etc. And then decide how best to deploy the application.

I believe web applications are evolving on the back of web pages and thus on the back of web browsers. We can view traditional web page rendering and navigation as the original web service. As the services get more diverse so the browser will need to provide a greater variety of capabilities, including being designed from the ground up to be maliable via plugins. The browser becoming a lightweight framework into which the right components are loaded from the net to create the application required. See flock for some interesting moves in this direction.

Ultimately will the browser be the web OS? In the same way that windows/linux etc provide an useful abstraction of the hardware, with the browser provide a similar abstraction of the web?

Sorry about this being muddled but I'm writing as I think.

Not to mention soon to be released Flock http://www.flock.com/

Not to mention soon to be released Flock (http://www.flock.com/ http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68823, 00.html Bound to change browsing nature significantly.

That's a nice link. I was really surprised by how Mozilla/Seamonkey users have such issues with Firefox. It seemed like few people used Mozilla because it did something for them that Firefox/Thunderbird doesn't, but instead because they don't like Firefox/Thunderbird for whatever reason (extensions, UI issues, etc.) I wonder if there's a Firefox Wiki where people list why they don't like Mozilla but like Firefox!

I guess it shouldn't be surprising that there would be a backlash against Firefox given its popularity. I guess now Mozill is much more 31337. Just wait until Flock comes out...