I tried the new version of the Flock web browser and so far I’m liking this Flock Browser. It’s like Motorola Blurr for your browser. Since it is based on the Chromium Browser, which is the open source branch of Google’s Chrome browser, it supports Chrome’s features including Google Gears, Themes and Chrome Extensions.  It also imports your bookmarks from other browsers on install to sync with your Flock account.

Speaking of the flock account, it allows you to save your login credentials to social networking sites like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.  This means on subsequent installations your login data and bookmarks are saved with your account so logging into Flock logs you into everything.  After you login you are presented with a sidebar of your status feeds.  You can click the reply button to reply in the form that network uses.  For example, replying to twitter gives you options to @reply, retweet or direct message.  On facebook it’s comment, like, poke or message.  There is also a nifty “Post” button that supports multiple twitter accounts so you can post directly to facebook or a twitter account from the sidebar.  It also lets you select which network(s) you’re posting to, so your update could be sent to one, many or all of your accounts at once.  The sidebar also lets you customize the feed to decide what gets displayed or filter it to show only updates from the selected social network.

This is a nice niche browser for the social networking scene.  Grab the 3.0 beta from http://beta.flock.com or the 2.6 browser from http://www.flock.com

Now I just wanna know when the thumb drive version is coming out.

Many people were taken by surprise when trying out the Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 when it first came out.  It was buggy, and the main deal breaker for me was the fact that the Netflix ‘Watch Instantly’ feature didn’t work.  Not that its a feature I use everyday, but at times it just turns a laptop into a portable movie player, and in my application, my laptop sits next to my bed and acts as my movie player since I don’t have cable or a vcr/dvd player in that room.  Not only was it annoying not being able to use the service, but a quick google search showed me that uninstalling IE8 from Vista SP1 wasn’t going to happen (although if you’re upgrading to vista from XP SP3, you’re automatically downgraded to IE7 for the save). › Continue reading…