A new version of Flock, the social web browser has been released! It adds some major improvements compared to the previous version, a brand new interface and integration with services like ma.gnolia and YouTube. Together with the new version of the browser, a new design of the official Flock web page has been launched.

At the first sight, I was quite impressed by Flock. After using the previous version for quite a while, I have to admit that this browser does bring some new things on the market, with many unique features. Even though it's based on Mozilla Firefox, the last version (0.90) brings a more unique feeling.

One of the main feature of Flock is the integration with web services, like Flickr, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, YouTube - and also integration with various blogging platforms. It is quoted to be "the social web browser" and in my opinion, it deserves this title completely.

On the downside, this new version did feel a bit buggy. The browser performed quite slow, even switching between tabs would cause a slight delay. It also is quite memory hungry - to the point of using about 1Gb of memory, 30% CPU time with only five tabs opened. I'm quite sure this was caused by a bug - but nevertheless, it wasn't a very nice 'feature'.

In conclusion, I was quite impressed by Flock and it's definitively worth keeping an eye on. Maybe the 1.0 version will be fully stable - and ready to replace Firefox for most "web 2.0" users.