Product Reviews

Flock is effectively a skinned version of Firefox, the world's second most popular browser. The menus are almost identical, and themes and extensions are installed in the same manner. All Firefox 1.5 plug-ins should also, with a minor tweak, work in Flock 0.5 or later, so we can expect this browser to quickly learn new tricks.

But beyond its core browsing features, this is the first dedicated Web 2.0 access tool we've seen. When installing it, you add details of your Flickr or PhotoBucket account (if you have either), so that recently added photos will appear in a collapsible, smoothly-scrolling strip at the top of the document window. You can add other people's Flickr details here to browse their postings without visiting Flickr itself, and use an uploader tool to add new images to your

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own account. Of course, you can already do this using Flickr Uploader with iPhoto, but by using Flock you can drag images from the desktop, or add them in bulk as a batch.

Photostreams are little more than image-based RSS feeds, so it's no surprise there's a full-blown RSS aggregator built in. Its dedicated button next to the URL bar splits the window in two, hiving off your feed names from their content so you can skip through the various sites in turn. A 'Front Page', meanwhile, gives you a newspaper-like headline page split into panes.

Blog-writers will find the integrated posting tool a far more pleasant interface than the one that comes as part of Blogger, Wordpress and the like. It opens as a separate window, with drag-and-drop features similar to the Flickr uploading tool, so it's easy to give your posts a bit of life through judicious use of pictures.

A small clipboard tool at the bottom lets you save page elements - text, images and so on - to refer back to later on. Called web snippets, they're copied into a collapsible holder, allowing you to copy text from one page into a form on another, for instance.

At heart, this is little more than a skinned, but neatly packaged edition of Firefox, but with the same kind of guerrilla marketing, it could be a far more serious competitor to the hegemony of Safari on the Mac, and IE on Windows machines.