I have to admit that when I first heard about Flock, I thought that the hype was totally out of proportion with what it deserved to be. A Mozilla-based browser with a bunch of baked-in extensions seemed like a dumbed-down version of what someone could easily cobble together with Firefox and some carefully chosen add-ins. Of course, the downside of doing it yourself is that you need to do the legwork of figuring out what to install, then maintain the install yourself - sort of a pain. The upside, though, is that you get exactly the functionality you’re looking for, and nothing extra.

I gave Flock a try back then (well over a year ago), and while I was pleasantly surprised that it was better than I expected, it certainly wasn’t compelling so I promptly forgot all about it.

Recently I’ve heard a lot of people online (particularly ones I trust) talking about how good the Flock 1.0 beta is. While I’ve been trying to avoid the “me too” attitude of having to try every new tool that gets some good comments, I have to admit my attitude about maintaining a browser with all of my preferred extensions is getting a bit cumbersome. If Flock can get it 75% right, it’s good enough for me.

Surprisingly, Flock seems to be getting it right. All of the baked-in functionality works extremely well, and is virtually seamless. While I haven’t yet tried installing some very important add-ins like Greasemonkey, I hear that Flock is compatible with many (but not all) Firefox extensions.

If you’re looking for a browser that integrates with your online life, services like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or del.icio.us, have a hard look at Flock. Like me, you might be surprised at what you see.

Oh, and did I mention it integrates with your blog? This post was written entirely in the built-in blog editor in Flock.

Tags: flock, browser, web, beta