I’m taking a test drive of another browser (this one makes 5 installed and in at least occassional use on my Mac) called ‘Flock’. It’s really early on in development, but is a derivative of the Mozilla codebase. As best I can make out from the cryptic blog entries I’ve been able to piece together, Flock is the first attempt to extend Mozilla ‘beyond the browser’ as a sort of alternative platform to Java, not to mention more traditional operating systems you might recognize like Windows or OSX.

Flock works, and hasn’t crashed on me (yet) - in fact I’m posting this entry using it - it’s major emphasis seems to be on sharing bookmarks and blog entries. The ‘community driven’ web experience paradigm. I must admit I quickly became more interested in del.icio.us, the bookmark sharing website that Flock seems to be tightly integrated with, than I was in Flock itself. Since I don’t imagine I will be switching entirely over to Flock, I made sure I had a working Firefox extension that would allow me to keep using my new del.icio.us account.

I’m not sure how much I can believe that Mozilla can really become a full fledged development platform to rival Java, but web apps are certainly starting to mature, and run everywhere on minimal hardware with free browsers, so anything is possible.

On the topic on Mozilla - I’m happy to report an almost perfect deployment of
Firefox through Windows 2000 Adv Server / Active Directory / GPO (Group Policy) to our 40 odd machines at work using an msi (Microsoft Installation Package) by
Frontmotion and adm (Administrative Templates) by
FirefoxADM. Folks came in to work and found a pretty new Firefox icon they couldn’t resist clicking, many were even able to click ‘Next’ to import their settings without hand-holding too. Next to deploy Thunderbird!

(update) What are the 5 browsers I have installed?
Apple’s Safari - the Mac OS X browser v. 1.3.1
Mozilla Firefox 1.5b
Mozilla Suite 1.7.12
Opera 8.5
Internet Explorer:mac 5.2
Flock 0.4.8
– oops, that’s six I see, but I never use IE, so I don’t count that one.