Flock 2.5 review

Most browsers are built to be as flexible as possible to cope with whatever web pages their users might throw at them.

Flock comes from a slightly different direction. It's designed for the social web. It's called 'the social web browser'. That's not to say it can't cope with normal browsing, but it does have many added features for the compulsive sharers who like to blog this, update their status on that, share pictures over here, and save other people's posts over there.

As an offshoot of the Mozilla project, Flock's most essential technical underpinnings are undeniably strong. Much of the internal workings and basic features are identical to those in Firefox, and in use it feels much the same.

The social media add-ons are apparent from the start, though. The My World tab - set as your home page by default - is devoted to collating your favourite stuff in one single view. It's made up of a series of widgets you can customise to display content from video and photo sites, RSS feeds, saved searches at Twitter and useful bookmarks.

You'll need to log in to your social network accounts (at Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and the like), but once you have, Flock will remember them and integrate them elsewhere. So, once signed in to Facebook, Flock enables a browser-wide chat tab that can stay visible at all times, even when you're not on a Facebook web page. Drag a URL or picture into the tab to share it and discuss it with friends there.

Twitter users also get a lot of new features in this release. The sidebar remains the primary way of viewing your own account, but it's now possible to create and save Twitter searches from inside My World. Saved searches will refresh themselves automatically, and line up in neat, nicely designed columns inside the My World tab.

This addition turns Flock into a serious Twitter search and monitoring tool, and that alone might make it worth downloading.

To make life easier still, another new feature called FlockCast lets you automatically send an update to Facebook when you perform an action on another site. So if you use the built-in functions to add a post to your blog, upload a photo to Flickr, or a video to YouTube or a status message to Twitter, you can get it instantly echoed to Facebook. Right now, only Facebook is supported as a destination, but it's a nice idea and one that could get much more useful if more services are supported in future Flock updates.

Purists might find Flock's user interface features rather intrusive. The default toolbar is overcrowded, with 21 different buttons and controls in eye-catching bright blue and orange shades. The window itself glows with faux-3D swooshes, like something out of the very earliest days of Aqua. It's not a big deal at all, but it gives the application an outdated look that belies its capabilities.

Flock is easy to dismiss as a toy, rather than a tool for serious web work. But it copes with the non-social web just as well as its cousin Firefox, and if your work or play involves frequent use of social networking services (especially Twitter and Facebook), its additional features could be a big time-saver.