A new browser based on the Mozilla/Firefox codebase aims to take advantage of the most recent and important innovations on the Web.

Not too long ago, Netscape collapsed under the weight of the bloat in its browser package, without getting help from the onslaught brought about by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser’s rise to dominance.

It finally released its code as open source, and in its ashes, the Phoenix was born, and it eventually became Firefox, a spiffy new browser that was lightweight, removed all the mostly unneeded weight in the old browser, had eventually became a distant, but strong no. 2 in the browser space.

While the browser developers are busy improving their software for the next release, a new group has created a new browser that is specifically meant to take full advantage of the recent developments and innovations on the Web. It’s called “Flock.” It’s based on Firefox’s open source code and it aims to be Web 2.0’s preeminent browser.

After more than a hundred million downloads, the Firefox browser still grows in leaps and bounds with its slim, sleek nature, tabs and a host of other functions that are a boon to its users even when other strong contenders like Safari and Opera offered similar strengths.


FIRST, THE NEW WEB
There have been vast changes in the deeper Web, revolving around social networking functions such as sites with communities of members whose own links and preferred sites are available for other members to view, who in turn have their own selections (bookmarks, among others) available for view or collection by others in the network.

It’s become quite different from the way the Web has become popularly used thus far, and these changes have became known by its own moniker, Web 2.0. There have been talk of different types of Web 2.0 before, but mostly revolving around rhetorical or private initiatives that never garnered public traction. The real Web 2.0 on the other hand, is comprised of different sites and related functions that are rapidly sweeping the Internet in a way not too different from how the Web itself grew in its early days of commercial public use.

For example, Del.icio.us is wildly popular utility site for “social bookmarking,” that lets users store and share their favorite site links, and are based on how people now can privately “bookmark” sites they like in their web browser. But in the case of Del.icio.us, it makes your links (bookmarks) available for viewing and use by the public. In fact, it is meant as a tool for making public bookmark collections for sharing and linking with others.

People can “tag” your bookmarks in the same way you can do for theirs, and you can view the tags and bookmarks of other people, see who and how many people have tagged a certain word, topic or site, and what other bookmarks those people have made, and so on, based partly on the idea that if someone liked the site or topic you bookmarked, it goes to reason that you might also like what other site or link that person has bookmarked.

Another example is the rapidly growing Digg, a tech news website that eschews the traditional news site using a top-down editorial control to a more democratic one where users submit stories, which are placed in a temporary holding area and then await being voted upon (called a “digg”) by members, where the stories getting enough votes go to the site’s homepage, thereby letting the members instead of editors decide which stories go to the homepage.

There are also the popular blogging sites, as well as the purely social networking sites like Friendster, Orkut and Tribe that have people the world over abuzz, and all of which have been recently trumped by MySpace. Then there is Flickr, the digital photo sharing site, and many more as well, all revolving around the social nature of the Internet.


ENTER FLOCK
Flock is the new web browser that in its current incarnation is more like a specialized version of Firefox. But this specialization may be the one difference that it needs to take the Web by storm, as it focuses on providing the social context to Web browsing instead of just information and email. It does what Firefox does, and adds the social networking dimension.

It has integrated blogging, Flickr support, synchronization with Del.icio.us, and other goodies, with more sure to come.

It's easy blogging tools for example, lets you write and publish your blog posts right from within your browser, taking care of your blog account and does everything else.

The "Flock Shelf" is a type of scrapbook for saving Web items, making them ready for you to reuse in your blog.

Its current version is still under heavy development and buggy (not ideal for downloading just yet), but conceptually, it shows a lot of promise as it aims to build something new on top of leveraging the Firefox technology that is known and proven to work.

And it’s a harbinger of things to come, not quite a revolution like the Internet’s explosion only a decade ago, but an evolution that’s bound to have deep implications on how we use the Web in the future, and how the best things are yet to be.

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