After a little more than a couple of years of development, the Flock team has finally released version 1.0 of Flock, a Firefox-based browser that aims to cater the most connected users with its long list of supported web services spanning bookmarking, photo sharing, social networking and blogging.

Like Firefox and virtually any Mozilla-based application, Flock is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X in twelve languages including Spanish, Chinese, German, and French. The Windows installer however is noticeably bigger than Firefox’s. Weighting about 10 MB, it almost doubles Firefox’s 5.3 MB. The Adobe Flash plugin, bundled with Flock, accounts for about 1MB of the extra luggage.

The setup is as easy as it gets. You may want to know that there’s a checkbox for allowing the collection of non personally identifiable usage information, and it is checked by default. So the paranoid may want to click those Next buttons slowly.

On first run you are presented with a very nice looking user interface (specially if you like blue) with buttons and toolbars that should feel very familiar for Firefox users. The stop and reload buttons are merged by default, but you can customize the toolbar to get independent buttons back. Flock also allows to remove the Go and Share buttons out of the box.
A big star button is placed next to the location bar and it works in a similar way to Firefox 3 star button: one click adds it to your favorites collection, another one lets you set a specific folder to store it. You can also define tags for favorite sites but they seem to be of no use except when using remote bookmarks with Magnolia or del.icio.us, the supported social bookmarking services.

The Flock toolbar is part just like Firefox’s bookmarks toolbar with selected bookmarks and bookmark folders ready for quick access. But it also centralizes Flock’s social stuff together with nine buttons that provide access to My World, people, media bar, feedmarks (web feeds), favorites, accounts, a web clipboard, blog editor and a photo uploader.

Since some of Flock toolbar estate is dedicated to function, space for bookmarks is limited. I wonder if it would have been a better idea to send the social buttons to the menu bar where a lot of space is wasted or they could have got rid of the menu bar at all.

My World (about:myworld), is a dashboard style page featuring your latest visited web feeds, latest visited favorited (bookmarked) web sites and media from your available media feeds, along with the same options as in the Flock toolbar and a search bar. Depending on your browsing habits it could be a good place to start the day.

Accounts is where you add your credentials for one of the supported web services: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube in the People category; Photobucket and Piczo for media sharing; Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournalk, Typepad, Wordpress.com and Xanga for blogging and del.icio.us and Magnolia in the social bookmarking category.

It’s very straight forward: click on a service, enter your credentials and you are good to go.

Services from the People category (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube) are displayed in the People sidebar, with quick access to messages posted and media recently uploaded. Click on the Media link of one of your contacts and the cool media bar will appear.

The media bar is a scrolling window placed above the current web page where your friend’s shared media (photos and video) is displayed. If you visit a site offering a media web feed it is also launched on the media bar and you can add it as a favorite for quick future access.

Flock’s implementation of web feed reading is a mixed result for me. On one hand it effectively separates regular bookmarks from web feeds and lets you organize them on folders which is how I prefer it to be.

On the other it didn’t import properly my Firefox live bookmarks. I tried moving them manually from the Favorites sidebar but it only works with single feeds and not folders which made it too painful.

In the end, I had to manually export my Firefox feeds as an OPML file (thanks to Sage), and then use Flock’s native OPML import/export capabilities to get them in. OPML should be standard these days, really.

And Flock should realize many of their new users will be previous Firefox users and should offer an effortless, accurate import.

The web feed reader provides a very nice looking web page with options to view posts in one or two columns and set how much of each post you want to see at a glance. It also lets you save a feed post for easier retrieval from the special Save Article folder.

Web clipboard is a beautiful, useful feature. There are time when you just need to grab a piece of text or an image for an email, a blog post or just as a quick reminder, and bookmarking a page just doesn’t make the cut: you want that specific piece of content. With web clipboard, you select that piece and drag it to the sidebar where it is stored and ready to be used. Then you can quickly check it out, visit the original source or delete it.

The blog editor provided is a capable tool for creating blog posts with the usual formatting tools, plus it integrates the web clipboard which becomes really handy here. Drafts are stored locally which is a great thing for working offline, unfortunately there’s no way to save them as online drafts.

I started writing this review with Flock’s blog editor and everything went good until I tried to insert an image. It happens that you can’t upload images just enter the address of an already uploaded file. I thought it could be because I am using a custom WordPress installation but my test with Blogger showed the same limitation.

As expected, my WordPress special buttons for adding breaks and embedding media content aren’t available neither. So for me at least, it could be somewhere to start a blog post (as it obviously is and feels closer to the web than a text editor for example) but hardly enough to finish it.

The included photo uploader works like a charm: you drag photos from your computer to the media bar, enter a title for each of one, some tags (the option is available depending on what service you are going to upload the images to), do some minor editing (rotate, crop) and set options to resize the photos, select an album, and that’s it. My test with Flickr felt very easy and quick.

Those are the most dramatic improvements but there are many other little ones that users, specially Firefox users, may like or not.

For example, the tab bar features a new tab button. A war could start at any moment because of this feature alone. The Flock team however has made a product for users in general and not just Firefox users and I think it makes the most sense to exhibit a feature as useful as tabbed browsing as much as possible.

Feature discoverability is another area where Flock shines. Whenever you land on a page serving web feeds, media web feeds or a custom search engine, an information bar pops up explaining what’s going on and how you can subscribe to the page feed or add the page search engine to your list. Same occurs when you star a page: it tells you how to set more properties. You can then turn off these notifications with a single checkbox click.

Search also has some interesting tricks. You can get live results (as you type) from sites like eBay, Craiglist, Technorati and a few others you specify at the same time. Other search engines can also be added to the Search Elsewhere section to quickly look for the search terms with other search engines.

Flock has a small selection of hosted extensions compared to Mozilla Add-ons. Fortunately at least some Firefox extensions available there work without a problem with Flock. Google Notifier and FireFTP, two of my favorite extensions had no problem to install and work immediately. Sage however seemed to get confused with the somewhat different bookmarks structure Flock uses. I guess this will be the overall experience depending on whether a extension deals with some customized feature or not.

In the end, whether you like Flock or not, or whether you will jump from Firefox to Flock will depend on how much value you find in the additional features. It could be easy to label Flock as just a Firefox remix but in my short three day test drive it felt like the sum of the parts is larger than the individual extensions.

The Flock team has done a really great job integrating so much stuff in an intuitive, efficient way which is a very hard task as anyone who has followed a long user interface discussion could agree.

For me it’s still not what I want from a social browser. I don’t want to go after my friends or ask them to go after me through several web service providers to get pictures in some place, blog posts in another and messages in yet another service.

I want a standard way of personal sharing. I want to have several providers but make it transparent for my friends. They should only need to know my user name. Probably my OpenID username and that should be enough to follow me wherever I am if I authorize it.

Another point to note is that since Flock is based on Firefox code, a delay between the latest Firefox security and stability update and Flock’s is expected. As of this writing, Flock 1.0 is still based on Firefox 2.0.0.8 code and not the latest 2.0.0.9. It may not be fair to bring it up as a con but it is a fact that should be considered specially for security updates. Some comments on the topic from the Flock team would help as well.

In the meantime, Flock provides a strong product for those who enjoy and have the time to keep up with several services. I would like to see for how long the selected web services remain relevant and whether Flock will be ready to jump to the next generation when it arrives.