The first thing I did after installing Flock was head to their site to install some extensions. Currently there aren't very many extensions for Flock (its in beta so I won't hold that against it), but I was able to find the Gmail Notifier and Adblock (two of my favorite extensions). Both installed as they should and worked just fine. One of the most interesting "features" Flock has is that its extensions site can convert Firefox extensions so that they will work with Flock. While the conversion is still buggy (It kept saying the XPI I uploaded was something else in their database that had already been converted) the one extension that I did manage to get to convert worked like a charm. Once they get the extension converter working, it will be a great boon to Flock.

The next thing I did was set up my bookmarks. Google Bookmarks are not supported, so I opted to try Shadows out (which I think I like more than Google Bookmarks, but that is for another post) since I already gave Del.icio.us (the only other supported bookmarking service) a spin and was not fond of it. This is where Flock outshines Firefox by leaps and bounds, using Shadows was just as simple as using the traditional bookmarking feature of any browser (with the added benefit of being able to share you bookmarks with the world if you choose). One of the nicest features was that sites that I had bookmarked and organized at work were available and already organized for me when I got home. (I had figured that I would have to at least set up the bookmark folders in Flock, but to my surprise all the settings carried over). I cannot say how much I loved this tight integration with Shadows. I really hope someone either develops an extension to add this to Firefox or the Firefox dev team borrows this advance from Flock. (Currently there is only one Shadows extension for Firefox and it is "so-so" at best.)

I had heard the built in news reader in Flock was very similar to the Sage Firefox extension, except with better integration to the browser proper. So I installed Sage in Firefox and imported my OPML file from Bloglines into both readers. Flock's reader ended up being extremely similar to Sage in function and performance. The only feature of Flock's readers close integration with the browser that I found useful was the "News" button on the toolbar that lit up when new posts were available to read. Other than that, Flock's reader was pretty much the same as Sage (in fact I wouldn't be surprised if the two readers share code with each other).

Other features Flock has that I didn't really get a chance to thoroughly test include integration with Flickr and Photobucket (I don't use either, so I wouldn't know if it works well with them or not - if any readers have tried out this functionality, please share your thoughts in the comment) and the ability to post to your blog using a built in post editor. While I did try out the post editor, it felt very sluggish, which made posting frustrating. Being beta code, that's okay as long as they fix it before their final release. So I will hold off judging the post editor until I get to play with it in a latter version of the browser.

Overall Flock felt sluggish and used much more memory than my Firefox install (at some points up to twice as much, though the margin was much less in Windows for whatever reason), but still being in Beta I can forgive that (again as long as it is fixed). Page rendering was the same as Firefox, which is to be expected since Flock is, at its heart a heavily modified Firefox variant. In fact, none of the core browser functionality was much different from Firefox at all.

While I will defiantly keep revisiting Flock as it moves though its development cycle, I didn't see anything in the browser that made it worth writing home about (other than the tight social bookmarking integration, which I hope will be added somehow to Firefox). There wasn't anything that Flock did, that Firefox couldn't do just as well with some extra extensions. If you are considering taking Flock for a spin, I suggest that unless you like to live on the bleeding edge, you hold off on installing Flock at least until the next beta release (or even the 1.0 release).

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