You’d think that the market wouldn’t have room for a YAB (Yet Another Browser) but you’d be wrong. When I first saw Flock back when it was first released in late 2005 I chose not to write about it thinking it would be another flash in the pan. I recently took another look and to say that I am really impressed would be an understatement!

Flock is a variant of the Firefox browser and comes with a number of useful extensions some of which are built-in. When you install Flock it imports your cookies, bookmarks and browsing history as well as your saved passwords from Firefox, Safari or IE. Flock also offers to set up other services such as flickr or photobucket for photo sharing and del.icio.us and Shadows for bookmarks management and sharing.

You can also post to blogs (Flock provides a built-in editor) including Blogger, Drupal, LiveJournal, MoveableType, Typepad and WordPress; capture Web “snippets” into a drag and drop tool bar; and manage and read newsfeeds. Flock also provides integrated search, and while its parent Firefox defaults to Google, Flock uses Yahoo.

One of the cool things about Flock is the amount of care that has gone into the details of the user interface. For example, you can click on the start icon next to the address field to add the current address to the favorites list, or you can click and hold to add the link via a dialog that lets you categorize the link.

Flock also provides some optional extensions such as Forecastfox, which adds weather forecasts from Accuweather to the status or menu bars; and Session Manager, which tracks all open sites and after a restart offers to reload either the last or any previous set of sites (once installed this also works for Firefox as well – a huge improvement!). The Flock developers bravely promise that in the near future they will be able to convert extensions written for other browsers to work with Flock.

I’ve now been using Flock for about a week and I am really impressed. It adds a layer of serious polish to Firefox and as I was extremely happy with Firefox you can guess that I am ecstatic over Flock! Take a look and tell me if this isn’t possibly the best browser available.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.