X

Flock: the A-bomb in the browser war?

Flock: the A-bomb in the browser war?

Molly Wood Former Executive Editor
Molly Wood was an executive editor at CNET, author of the Molly Rants blog, and host of the tech show, Always On. When she's not enraging fanboys of all stripes, she can be found offering tech opinions on CBS and elsewhere, and offering opinions on everything else to anyone who will listen.
Molly Wood
2 min read
Ladies and gentlemen, the browser war just took on a whole new hue. A new, Firefox-based browser called Flock hit the Web today (as a developers' preview, anyway), and, in my opinon at least, it looks like a winner. If by "winner" you mean "the product that makes you wonder what we were all fighting about in the first place." More after the jump (really).

If it's anything like it sounds, Flock will take browsing to its obvious next step: a gateway to Web 2.0. It integrates with del.icio.us for online, shared bookmarking. It includes a built-in RSS reader, integrated into the Web browser in a way that other browsers don't yet have. It also has a button for creating a blog post using Wordpress, Six Apart, and Blogger, among others, and it's got drag-and-drop support for uploading images to Flickr.

Flock is, for now, a developer's preview; I'll be downloading it today and hope to have a fuller preview soon. In the meantime, though, just reading that list of features has me thinking about how obvious it is that browsers, right now, just flat-out don't do enough to bring the power of the Web to this limited little window we're using. In fact, I feel kind of furious that I got sucked into ever squabbling over whether Opera was better than Firefox was better than IE was better than who-knows-what-else instead of banging my Web-surfing fork on the table and demanding a heck of a lot more than any of them were giving me in the first place!