It’s been awhile since I played with the Flock browser. I wrote about Flock here in October ‘05, but at version 0.2, although the browser worked, it wasn’t on par with other browsers I use (I mainly use Firefox at this time). Flock has progressed a great deal since then, and if you use Flickr (the free photo sharing site), you might want to take a look. I’ll describe what it’s able to do below…Primer: Click here for a quick review of what a browser is, and how Flock does the job. Flock is more than just a web browser, and although I don’t discuss it here, it can also serve as an ‘News aggregator‘.

To be fair, Flock v.0.5.15 isn’t even a real ‘beta release’ yet, they’re calling it a ‘developer preview’, but it’s quite functional and seems stable enough (at least on the Mac). Based on the Mozilla Gecko engine, Flock has all the features I dig about Firefox including the search plugin window, and a powerful real-time cache search (finds stuff you’ve already visited and displays it in real-time as you type). Flock developers are planning for a first release, and you should see announcements soon for version 0.7 codenamed Cardinal this month sometime.

There are several new features available in this newer version of Flock. While the Flickr integration isn’t the only thing that’s new, it was the thing that really grabbed my attention. I’ve been using Flickr for some time, at first just to try it out, after a friend (Non-Prophet) mentioned it. You can upload a certain amount of photos to Flickr for free every month (there is also a ‘PRO’ version for a nominal yearly fee which allows unlimited uploads). The service allows you to share photos with friends and family very easily, and create a website for them even if you know nothing about coding for the web. Flock provides a Flickr ‘roll’ viewer in a ‘toolbar’ at the top of the browser window (a strip about 100 pixels high just below the normal tools menu but above any webpage you happen to be viewing). If you ’sign in’ to your Flickr account, you get some other features as well, like a quick link to your own photos, as well as your registered contacts’ photostreams.

In addition to viewing images, you can UPLOAD them too (once you have a Flickr account)! This is pretty cool, since otherwise you need to visit your own Flickr webpage and use their upload form, or download and install a separate program to perform this upload function. Having the upload function built so seamlessly into the browser is pretty slick and easy to use. By selecting the ‘Photo Uploader’ toolbar, the toolbar area changes from displaying photos to a blank area to which you can drag your photos.

Once you click the UPLOAD button, the image is sent to Flickr! Simple enough for a grandmother to love. That’s really the idea here, to make using the web to share and collaborate easy enough for non-webmastery types. Flock is on track to transform the web browser into a communication portal device of sorts. It may not be true ‘reinvention’, but it does offer a few truly innovative tools. I’ll be playing with Flock more in the future I can tell.