Browsers are an ever changing software program, or at least the good ones like Firefox are ever changing, the stale, dead ones like IE are stagnant. What is the browser world going to look like in 2006? To get the answer all you need to do is to check out the new beta browser called Flock. Flock takes browsing new the next level, it integrates it with your online persona via RSS, you are now reading articles while blogging the same articles in your Wordpress, TypePad, or Blogger account. Then when you decide that you want to bookmark a website, it just doesn’t bookmark it the old fashion way, it uses your del.icio.us account and syncs the bookmark with it also. You are sharing your online experiences with the world.

It’s very beta, so you know what that means, but so was Firefox at one time. The point is that you have the chance to be on the ground floor of the next great browser, it’s worth your time to check it out. Here are a few good links to visit.
Five Steps to Get Started
13 Things You Can Do With Flock
Flocks Screen Shots

Here are the features listed for Flock:

Out with bookmarks, in with Flock Favorites.
They’re stored online, and they’re shared, searchable, and tagged. Simply click the Star in the URL bar and you’ve flagged a page. You can easily retrieve it later. The Star turns orange (and is orange the next time you visit the page, to remind you that this is one of your favorites).

You can add tags to Favorites by simply clicking the little arrow next to the Star icon. Or, if you like to tag, Open the Flock menu, choose Preferences, and go to the Web Services section. Activate the “Clicking Star Performs Star and Tag” option.

Flock comes with the open source Clucene search engine built in. Each time you visit a web page, it indexes all the content on that page so you can easily retrace your steps later. Pages you’ve starred as Favorites float to the top when you do a History Search. History Search is stored locally for privacy. For more privacy, you can wipe it out using the Clear Private Data command.

With Flock, you can have multiple Favorites toolbars and switch back and forth between them.

Just like Firefox, Flock puts an icon in the URL bar when a site has one or more feeds. In Flock, you can click that icon to get an feed view of the page.

When you star a web page that has a feed, the feed is cached and updated every hour.

Flock automatically creates an aggregated view for all of your collections. If you create a collection of news sites that you visit every day, you can see an aggregated view of all your news site on one page.

With Flock, blogging is a fully integrated part of the Web. Flock includes a blog editor that works with WordPress (and the new Wordpress.com hosted service), Movable Type and Typepad (and shortly also Live Journal) and Blogger. Other blogging platforms have not been tested.

With Flock, blogging Flickr pictures is easy. You can drag and drop pictures from our integrated Flickr topbar right into your blog post.

The Shelf is a scrapbook for interesting web content that you want to blog about later.

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