Flock, the so called "Social Web Browser" has just released the third RC of it's upcoming 1.0 (codenamed falcon), though it's the first public release but is still in private beta.
First of all I've to admit, and let you know that I'm nothing near a review guy, so take this advice, and stop reading here if you're going to use this post as a motivate to start Flocking!
Well, I'm a long-time-but-not-frequent Flock user, actually Flock is the one (browser) which I put behind the proxy to make web surfing a bit more bearable (there're lots of websites which are not accessible here in Iran because of some governments policies, and yes, I won't write that damn word!), at the first I didn't use it's unique features, just simply as a web browser, as a polished Firefox maybe.
But after a while I told myself let's see how Flickr works from within the Flock, and it was great! But doing so for the rest of available integrations didn't go that smoothly, I never managed to make it's Blogging feature to work with my s9y, neither the YouTube experience was great (actually it couldn't be even if wanted to, 'cause I was behind proxy, using a 128Kbps capped connection).
But today, right after receiving an email from Flock guys indicating that the 1.0 beta is ready, I went and downloaded it, and as far as I can tell you, and experienced so far, it's awesome, it's now truly "People in the Browser", if you want to see them (People), simply launch the "People" sidebar, you'll like it.
The catchy feature was facebook integration, the twitter experience was smooth and the Flickr one has just got better.
Actually Flock is where the other browsers are trying to reach using extensions/add-ons. Flock is doing great around it's centric goal, the People, their interactions, media-sharing, communications and the rest, I think if there's a popular'n'cool web-service somewhere, there would be a Flock guy trying to land it into the Flock.
As you may already heard, Mozilla guys has launched a new project called WebRunner, a XULRunner based browser, based on a concept called Site Specific Browsers (SSB). What Flock is doing is not completely SSB (at least when you compare it with the definition over there at Mozilla wiki), but the point is something else.
All of us had experienced a revolution (an evolution to be precise) in web applications in recent months, all those cool and fancy graphics, big bold fonts, nice effects, to-be-desktopish efforts and the rest, but it was just on the web applications side, and nothing on their hosts (aka Web Browsers).
Actually the web browsers was ruining all the fun (e.g., with reaching 99% CPU usage and crashing) because simply they weren't ready.
But now seems web browsers has realized that they are steps behind their guests, they are trying to adopt their selves, and bringing us an even better web-surfing experience.
