The web is getting much more interactive with Web 2.0, but are the browsers keeping up? I recently came across one that tries to, and after giving it a go, I was left wishing I found it sooner. Flock is appropriately dubbed as a “social browser”, as it seamlessly integrates some of the more popular social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Gmail, Digg, and Flickr into the browsing experience.

Flock was founded in 2005, and the current version is their second major release. According to their site, the company is based in Redwood City, CA, and funded by several prominent angel investors. It’s actually based on the Firefox 3.0 engine, which means it’s fast, powerful, secure, and compatible with Firefox add-ons. As someone who uses a lot of extensions, this was welcome news. However, I had mixed results after installing some. Most worked fine, but Google Gears didn’t, along with a couple of others. This is unfortunate as I really need Gears for Google Docs.

This is what the Flock 2.0 browser looks like, with its start-up page:

At first, it felt a little cluttered with icons on the upper left-hand side, but learning about the functions of each made me appreciate what they’re there for. I particularly liked the well thought-out native feed reader, the built-in blog editor (compatible withWordPress, TypePad, and other blog engines), and the media bar (streams feeds of pictures and video from Flickr , YouTube, etc). The email and feed notifiers are also very handy, informing you at a glance if you have new messages. Meanwhile, the My World icon opens a tab that shows the latest on your favorite feeds, media, and friends.

It was easy to navigate around Flock’s menus, thanks to its faithfulness to Firefox’s scheme.  The only thing that I wasn’t too happy about was that the default search box for Flock is Yahoo! instead of Google, which I prefer for in-depth research. Of course, there are many workarounds to this, and only a matter of preference. Yahoo! is fine for the average user.

Unlike my experience with Google Chrome, using Flock exclusively for almost a week was virtually problem-free. Videos played smoothly, pages loaded fast, and web applications worked fine - no doubt thanks to the stability of the coreFirefox 3.0 engine. To be fair, Chrome was a new, experimental platform, and it had its own charms. Things can only get better.

In Flock’s future releases, I would suggest expanding support for more social networks, particularly those that are strong in certain regions like Friendster, hi5, Hyves, Bebo, and Orkut. Another feature to consider is IM support, to make the browser truly an all-in-one online communications hub. For now, Flock 2.0 has proven to be quite impressive, and I would consider making it my default browser, if only there wasn’t these add-on compatibility issues. Anyone who is into social media and don’t mind its quirks should give Flock a try.