Flock

I'm posting this entry from within Flock, a new browser based on Mozilla, the codebase which underlies Firefox. You might think the world needs a new browser like it needs a hole in the head, and I more or less agree with you, but Flock has some really cool features:

• You can link your bookmarks to your del.icio.us account so that they're always available when you move between computers.

• It integrates with a number of blogging services and software to let you blog directly from the browser. You can even highlight a chunk of text on the page, right-click on it and select "Blog This", and it opens up a blog post window with the text inserted and quoted, and the site name linked. (I'm finding that its blogging editor is incredibly annoying when you're trying to do bulleted lists)
  

• flickr integration, which seems to me to be a bit gratuitous, but it is kind of cool to get access to your photos in a toolbar (sorry, "topbar").
  

• Integrated RSS feed reader, which right now has a really clunky interface. But this is just a developer preview release, so I'm sure that will improve.
  

• "The Shelf"...kind of a clipboard for web content. You can drag-and-drop links, chunks of text, or pictures on to it and later drag-and-drop them into your blog posts (it seems to be made pretty specifically for blogging; you can't double-click on items in your Shelf to open them up, and although you can drop them onto any application that accepts clipboard data, what you get is an HTML-wrapped version of your content).
  

All in all, very impressive. I hope that some of these features (especially the social bookmarking integration) make their way over to Firefox, but I'll be keeping an eye on Flock's progress.