Flock is an intriguing new "social web browser" that is designed not just as a portal to the web, but to your friends' lives and the online communities where we share many of today's experiences. Launched with a 1.0 version based on Mozilla's Firefox code base in 2005, Flock has unveiled its first 2.0 beta that inherits all the performance and security enhancements in Firefox 3. Ars Technica goes hands-on with the Flock 2 beta to see what all the fuss is about.

In the beginning

Some browsers in recent years, like Opera, have incorporated other major functionality like e-mail clients. Firefox, on the other hand, made a name for itself by fostering, among other things, a healthy add-on community that can add, well... just about any feature you need.

Now, most of the major browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all offer a fairly standard set of features. The address bar and bookmark systems are now accompanied by basic RSS readers and password managers. Out of the box, most browsers are fairly well-matched in the feature department.

Let there be Flock





Flock 2 flying its full colors, with a social networking bar on the left, a media bar at the top, and a blog post window ready to go.



Flock brings a new paradigm to interacting with the web. Uniting the fundamental approaches of building in new features and allowing others to build whatever features they want, the Flock team designs with the idea that the web, for many users, has become an indispensable social platform. We share our photos on Flickr, we microblog, share links, and let people know what we're up to on Twitter and Facebook. We watch a new breed of videographer unleash creativity on YouTube, we find interestingness at social news sites, and we blog it all to our personal sites to help our friends, family, and fans keep up on what's new. Flock incorporates a broad set of features for both watching what happens at these sites and creating content for them.

Upon first run on Windows, OS X, or Linux, Flock hits the ground running by inviting users to explore the social features and tools it has to offer. While Flock is based on the Firefox code base, the most noticeable addition is a toolbar of socially-themed icons to the left of the bookmark bar. This toolbar is perhaps the most important launching pad for Flock's strengths as a social web browser, as it can open various sidebars and media bars that act as portals to services like Flickr, Twitter, del.icio.us, Blogger, YouTube Facebook, TypePad, Gmail, and more.

Flock reportedly can use virtually all of Firefox's add-ons, and while I'm not a heavy add-on user, I haven't run into an add-on that didn't work, at least with Flock 1, in the past (most add-ons are naturally disabled in Flock 2 due to its beta nature).

As you add your credentials for each of Flock's supported communities, notifications of your friends' activities appear in linear fashion in an all-encompassing People sidebar. This becomes a centralized panel for not only viewing what your friends are up to across all these services, but also an integrated tool for interacting with them at these services. An "action" button on each notification from a friend, regardless of the service, offers service-specific options for, say, sending a "shout" to a friend on Digg or "nudging" someone on Twitter who hasn't updated in a while.

A Media bar can be displayed at the top of the browser area specifically for sifting through photos and videos from sites like Flickr and YouTube. You can browse a specific friend's media collection or public streams and Flickr's popular "Interestingness" section. You can click the thumbnail of a photo or video, easily copy its HTML link or embed code, or click to create a new blog post window inside of Flock with all the basic editing tools.





Browsing YouTube videos in Flock's media bar. Popup controls for each video allow for easy blog post embedding or copying HTML and embed code to the clipboard.



Flock also offers a photo uploader for its supported photo sharing sites which include Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, and Piczo. You can drag and drop images from your computer's file system, then add basic metadata like titles, descriptions, and tags as you send your photos into the cloud.





An overlay appears on top of most photos and videos that makes it easy to blog or e-mail the media. You can even follow up on whatever else the media's creator has posted to the site it comes from.



Flock features a respectable blog editor that allows for easily posting just about anything you find on the web (it is not, however, a blog manager; you can't use Flock's tools to view a list of posts or edit typos in posts you've already published).

Photos from a web page can be dragged into a new post window. Mousing over photos and embedded videos will present a small toolbar that allows for one-click creation of a new blog post with the media already inserted. It's a refreshingly integrated experience that makes Flock an appealing browser simply from a blogging standpoint.

Flock's default "My World" homepage serves as a dashboard for your friends' activity, RSS feeds, and media channels. A fairly robust RSS reader allows for feeds to be categorized in groups, and you get some flexibility in how to view news items (one or two columns, just headlines or excerpts, etc.).

Flock's RSS reader is of course very well integrated with its other tools, allowing any news item to be blogged, saved, dugg, or e-mailed to a friend via webmail services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, or your desktop client.

No rest on the 7th day

As the Flock 2 beta is based on the shiny new Firefox 3 code base just released today, it inherits new features and stability while presenting some of the typical bugginess found in betas. Probably Flock 2's most significant enhancement is Firefox 3's revolutionary and responsible memory management.

Since Flock is such a media-intensive browser, Flock 1.x can quickly gobble up 300-400MB of RAM (or more) after just a couple hours of medium-to-heavy usage. Browse your friends' social timelines, peruse some photos at Flickr, open half a dozen tabs, and watch a YouTube video or two, and Flock 1.x joins nearly every other browser in hogging what has always felt like way, way too many CPU and RAM resources.

With Firefox 3 under the hood now, Flock 2 is a far more responsible resource citizen after heavy usage. Flock 2 also feels generally snappier and more responsive, even on my comparatively slow MacBook Air with 2GB of RAM.

Firefox 3's other benefits, like the new bookmark system, enhanced security with color-coded notifications, and a phishing filter that ties into a Google database are all baked into Flock 2 as well.

All that said, though, Flock 2 naturally could use some extra polish in a number of areas. It's a beta, so some issues are exempt for now. However, through my testing of using Flock as my primary browser, I've run into three crashes and a number of UI issues, some of which seem to be left over from Flock 1.

For example: the media bar can shrink only so far with the browser window, but it can't shrink past about 670 pixels; the tools at the top of the media bar ram together and get left behind if the window is shrunk any further. Considering that Flock makes heavy use of a left sidebar for many of its social features, there isn't much more room left to expand the browsing area if, like me, you want to be able to use another app alongside Flock. To solve this issue, Flock could perhaps lock the window at the media bar's minimum width, or dynamically roll some tools below the main toolbar when a user shrinks the window too far.

One thing about Flock's People sidebar that bothers me in particular is the fact that updates for services like Twitter and Facebook are truncated to just the few words that will fit on a single line. This is annoying from a usability standpoint as it forces the user to either mouseover the updates one by one and wait for a tooltip or, even worse, click through to the originating service to read everything in its entirety. What's the point of a birds-eye view People sidebar if users have to click over to a bunch of separate web pages to stay on top of what friends are doing?

The beta has a few other minor issues which I can't harp on too long because, well, it's a beta. Text areas sometimes are unresponsive after a page finishes loading, and Flock sometimes hangs on loading for a slightly longer period than I expect, but that could also be a result of me using it on a slower notebook with a 4200RPM hard drive.

Switching browsers for the first time

UI and beta nitpicking aside, I find myself seriously considering Flock as my main browser for the first time since it debuted in 2005. The Flock team built on Firefox 3 and got Flock 2 out in a surprisingly short amount of time, and having all these integrated social features at my fingertips with reliable, responsible performance is a breath of fresh browsing air.

I've remained a Safari man at heart over the years because of its slim, zippy nature, but Flock 2 is the first feature-packed (and fast) browser I've used that doesn't drag my computer down with its extra baggage. I tip my hat to the Flock team, as Flock 2 has already earned a place in my Dock.