Back to beta.

Sort of a blast from the past, a beta web browser that's fun to use, sort of like Netscape was back before Microsoft cornered the free browser market. Netscape back then wasn't free - the real official version, that is - which is why everybody used the public beta of the next official version. Because it was. Free. And everybody was excitedly expecting the next beta version which would be, of course, sooooo much cooler. And probably even work.

So now it's "Flock." And it's here.

"Free" is no longer an attraction, of course, since now everything is. Free. Although some are more free than others, meaning free as in "free speech," not "free beer." (Thank you.) The browser of choice these days is Firefox, the nimble and versatile offspring of Mozilla - a free suite that includes email and HTML composition and is in turn based on the old Netscape code.

Flock has its roots in Mozilla, too, and works a lot like Firefox (although it's still beta and I do miss that "Favorites" sidebar) but has better integration with a lot of stuff I use a lot, such as RSS feeds, a nicely improved blogging editor, a built-in flickr uploader (maybe I should go back to using that again) and some other stuff, most of which works and all of which mostly works, if you see what I mean. And the next beta version will be soooo much cooler, just wait and see.

(Which is why, by the way, you may have noticed a different format for citations in recent blog posts - I've been trying out Flock. And I like how it works, So I probably will, ummm, keep Flocking, you might say.)

And if you're still using Internet Explorer you are soooo not there.