Flock Browser Released

Does the world need another browser? Flock, a Palo Alto startup, thinks ”social browsing” makes the difference.

A preview of the new Flock browser, built on the Mozilla project codebase, was released late Friday afternoon.

Flock adds some of the most popular tools from social networking sites: Users can tag bookmarks instead of creating hierarchies of folders devoted to different topics, and the browser is integrated with del.icio.us, a service for storing and sharing Web bookmarks, as well as Flickr, Yahoo’s photo management/sharing service. Users can install alternative services, and the company plans to continue to integrate with others.

Blog posts can be created and posted from within the browser, while a sidebar called Shelf acts as a repository for blogging content, such as photos and text; items on the Shelf can be dragged into place on the blog post.

Some developers, like magentalady, criticized Flock for not simply contributing the work to the community as extensions to Firefox.

In a FAQ, Flock said 100 percent of the current code is available under the GPL license, and that the plan is for most of the code going forward to be open-sourced.

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