Flock 1.0 Public Beta is the Best Mac OS X Browser

9:17 pm, October 25th, 2007, Pete Mortensen

Ladies and gentlemen, Flock, the Mozilla-based open-source Web browser trying to make the social aspects of the Internet central, is finally useful. And oh, is it, useful. First introduced in the fall of 2005, the program, which integrates Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us and blogging software was for years a slower, more crashable alternative to Firefox. I never used it for more than about 10 minutes before. Suddenly, as of last week, it has vaulted over Firefox, Camino and Omniweb. It’s by far the best web browser for anyone with friends online that I have ever used. You should all download Flock 1.0 Public Beta at your nearest convenience. It even takes Firefox add-ons.

The marquee feature of the new version is the People Sidebar, a screen real estate gulping interface for a few key social media services. Essentially, once you register, you get a constant stream of new status and upload updates from all of your contacts of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Youtube. It just moves along. You can send messages, Poke people, send photos, or what have you, all without heading over to the hosting web page. The other key feature is the Media Bar, which allows subscriptions to the media streams from Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook or others. There’s drag and drop image, video and text support, as well as an incredible clipboard that goes far beyond the typical features to optimize for reuse.

Then, in addition to all of that, there’s a built-in blog editor that’s widely compatible and nearly as capable as ecto, my dedicated blog app of choice. Its only limitation right now is that it requires the use of one of its supported hosting services for images, not native image hosting.

Other than that, it’s revolutionizing the way I consume information and connect with the people around me. And it’s made blogging almost preposterously easy.

Thanks, Stuart — for showing the way!

Test-Drive Flock 1.0 | Flock

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, software, social, awesome

Posted by Pete Mortensen in Reviews | Comment on this article

About the author

Pete Mortensen is the communications lead for growth strategy firm Jump Associates and the co-author of Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy, a book and blog that are significantly more interesting than you might initially think. Pete's particular Apple avocations are both around design--interface and industrial. Follow him on Twitter!

Email the author | Read more posts by Pete Mortensen.

6 comments

[...] well, this morning whilst catching up with some blog post, I came across this at the Cult of Mac blog. It seems that I didn’t download the beta but a stable version that [...]

Code In Zen » Blog Archive » Flock 1.0 Public Beta., on October 26th, 2007 at 2:54 pm

THANK YOU!… I have been trumpeting the value of this browser for ages. It deserves more expsoure. A bit buggy but otherwise very cool!

ian, on October 28th, 2007 at 6:41 am

yeah this flock , is really great. i first read about it , on http://www.orangekite.com

peter guszti, on November 16th, 2007 at 6:41 am

[...] microsoft, web2.0 A new browser for Wondows, Mac and Linux has surfaced, and it’s really, really good! It’s a derivative of Firefox, so it feels very familiar, (if you’re using Firefox of [...]

I find this version of Flock worlds better than the early releases, but I haven’t been able to get it to work with my self-hosted Wordpress blog. Google tells me I’m not alone in this, and there’s no solid answer in the Flock forums yet.

Are you using it to post to this site?

Conor, on November 27th, 2007 at 6:41 pm

I’ve been using Flock for some time now and I LOVE IT. It makes blogging to my wordpress.com blog easier, handles photos easier, and I just bought a MacBook that I’m awaiting arrival as I just switched from PC to Apple and I’m excited to hear FLOCK is still available for my new MacBook.

sovereignjohn, on November 28th, 2007 at 11:39 am