Last week I wrote about the Flock browser, based on Firefox and a surprise hit with me because of its social-networking integration. The 1.0 version was great, but I was most eager about the 2.0 release, based on the Firefox 3 code and also open source (of course). Wait no longer; here it is.

The beta release of Flock 2 migrates all your existing Flock 1.x settings (or Firefox settings, if you're migrating from that), so I was up and running in seconds after installing the beta. I did have some new bookmarks in my parallel Firefox 3 beta installation that I wanted to use in Flock, so I did an export/import (actually, a backup/restore) and was right where I'd left off.

	(click image for larger view) Flock 2: Based on Firefox 3. The title of the "My World" page is customizable.

2.0 runs far snappier than 1.x, especially on script-heavy pages that typically bogged down. The look of the browser hasn't been tinkered with; there's been some polish in the presentation, but it's much the same as before (barring the "bug" icon in the upper-right corner for submitting feedback). I snapped open all my usual sites and spent about an hour browsing freely with no problems I could discern.

The screenshot here shows some of Flock's most immediately interesting features -- the "My World" page, which aggregates oft-visited sites, feeds, and activity tracked from social networking sites on a single dashboard. The view still isn't terribly customizable -- I would love, for instance, to be able to control the depth or verbosity of feeds on the page -- but it's far from useless, and a good framework that they can build on for future refinement. (The same comment applies to the app as a whole -- things are going to get really interesting when/if people start using Flock as a generic social-networking organizational system.)

I'm normally a little bolder than most about using beta software in a quasi-production environment -- but that said, Flock 2's beta is looking solid, and I encourage anyone who's already a Firefox fan to give it a spin.