Built on Mozilla, the newly released (pre-beta developer's edition) Flock browser threatens (promises?) to yank the browser back as the central window to the Internet experience. In the emerging era of Web-service sites displacing the browser's built-in tools (I'm thinking about newsreaders primarily, but also social search and tagging sites like del.icio.us, My Web 2.0, and Digg), Flock seeks to bundle everything you need into the browser toolbar. That it comes remotely close to succeeding at this early stage in its development is astounding. Put in a few needed tweaks, build out some essential extensions, and Firefox would be bumped off my desktop.

Unsurprisingly, RSS is deeply and integrally woven into Flock. So is tagging. So is social bookmarking. And so is blogging—this last might be the blockbuster feature, at least for very active bloggers using multiple platforms…

As in Firefox, Flock detects an RSS (or Atom) feed on any page, providing an orange FEED button in the address bar. Clicking it switches to a newsreader display of the page’s feed. This enables you to instantly toggle between a NY Times article, for example, and a readable view of all the articles in that page’s feed. Whoa. Great way to fully audition a feed before subscribing.

Favorites: A Favorites sytem replaces Bookmarks in Flock. Clicking a star icon in the toolbar adds a page, and clicking a multiple-star icon opens the Favorits Manager sidebar. (By the way, adding tags to a page is accomplished with beautiful elegance.) There, the social aspect of Flock is revealed, as you see the community’s tags and saved pages. As in Del.icio.us or My Web 2.0, you can get lost in blissful tag trolling. I wish that launching a page from a Favorite did not remove the tag sidebar; then the Back button would be eliminated from browsing tagged pages. One important quibble: I could not find a way to limit the view to my tags only, even when I pressed a button called Your Library.

Blogging: Like a universal blogging bookmarklet, Flock strives to avoid logging into a blog service to post an entry. Flock was partially successful adding username/password combos for all my blogs. I run test blogs in Yahoo! 360, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, Blogger, Typepad, WordPress, Movable Type, and Radio Userland. (I did not test Flock with any Weblogs Inc blog.) Flock was unable to log into my Movable Type administrative area. Another problem: Flock gets confused when multiple blogs have the same title. Since some of my test blogs are identically called “Brad Hill,” Flock had a lot of issues to work through. The upshot is that not all of those blogs are available in Flock for posting, but this is not a problem most users will face. NOW: Please give users the ability to cross-post to multiple blogs.

Early difficulties notwithstanding, the universal bookmarklet concept is being amply proved in this preliminary release, and Flock has more tricks up its sleeve. Highlight any text on a Web page and drag it to the blogging panel (which pops up when you click a blogging toolbar button), and your blog entry becomes instantly formatted with the highlighted text featured as a quote, nicely formatted in blockquote. The page link is bundled into the entry as well when you drag text. All of this displays in flawless WYSIWYG, and the whole presentation is pretty as a morning flower.

Flickr is integrated into the blogging panel, but I could not get it to recognize my Flickr username. When it’s working, I imagine that I’ll be able to easily add a Flickr photo to a blog post—an easier process than many blog services force you through to upload a pic from the hard drive. We’ll see.

Damn. This thing has vision, and is thought through from the viewpoint of a rampaging blogger/consumer of information. The iteration I downloaded has not tangled up my machine in any fashion. I’ll be following the development of Flock every step of the way. Get it here.