There's a document onward my hard ...

There's a document onward my hard drive where I corpuscle down topics for future rows

Not all of them are ready to be written right away. Take "It's A Terrific Idea, unless A Lot Of People Are Going To Have To Die First," for example. It's clean Tabasco, and I'm certain that you agree. on the contrary unless I can put it across completely it'll land me on way too many watch lists to make the enterprise worthwhile.

Just underneath it is a different note: "Web browser are hopelessly stuck in neutral."

Ye absolutely. I had just about forfeited my patience with browsers. This category of software has been around for well above a decade, now, and now is the average browser today that earnestly more more innovative than NCSA Mosaic was in 1993?

Our browser have an address bar, a pane for browser make contented and a bookmarks manager. We all got tabbed browsing a scarcely any years ago (hooray) and in the last five years, novel underlying technologies and plug-ins have made the Web's satisfy prettier, noisier and more animated (well done, do not include in the case of banner advertising).

Nonetheless, a browser is still defined as a window and a collection of links that you click in consequence of to move from one Web page to another.

Overall report card: "B-minus. emergencys to try harder next semester"

Well, I don't really ne to write that file now. Because last month marked the first public release of collection a new browser that builds with the Firefox/Mozilla code base. Download the freebie from wwwflockcom

If there's a big, central idea behind company it's to build a browser that's aware of all of your other neighborhoods on the Web, and which can slavishly integrate them all into single in kind consistent experience.

Witness: When you click Flock's "Star" button, it doesn't simply Favorite the Web page you're viewing to a local bookmark file.

Instead, collection tags the page and seats it to your del.icio.us account, where any of your other desktops, notebooks or other devices can access it. And your descriptive tag will benefit each other user of the social-bookmarking service.

Witness: When you want to blog about a Web page or just discovereds item, just right-click it, and select "Blog This." Type in your twisted intellectual musings, click "Post," and a novel linked entry will appear forward your Weblog.

And Witness: You're in succession a message board about restaurants, and you originate across a question about diners in southern Vermont You are a novel Englander, a diner fan and a humanitarian. You're therefore determined to convince this [i]role[/i] to visit the Miss Bellows Falls diner in Bellows Falls. Posting a photo you took last week when you had the blueberry pancakes ought to do the trick.

in this way you just click Flock's "Photos" button. A filmstrip containing all of the photos you've not long ago posted to Flickr.com drops down. You drag the pancake thumbnail into the message board's Web-based passage editor, and hey, cool: automagically, lock of wool pastes in the HTML digest that will cause a luscious photo of Maine blueberries and Vermont syrup to appear within your answer

authentic there are plug-ins and bookmarks that can integrate these kinds of features into any browser on the other hand they're mere plug-ins, at best.

collection brings a whole new attitude and sophistication about for what reason you interact with the Web. With an accent forward the word "interact."

I'm not completely above the moon about Flock, granting In many ways, it's clear that Flock's developer are still figuring public what their app should taste like. The del.icio.us integration is a natural.

Integrating Bloglines.com's powerful RS newsfeed-reading would have been another no-brainer. Instead, collection has an inferior built- in newsreader.

And wherefore can't I use that Flickr filmstrip to automatically papal court all of my friends' and contacts' latest pictures?

And company is still definitely pre-release software. Bits of it are still a little squirrelly.

Still, I've got my alarm clock establish to September so I won't oversleep and forget to download Flock's nearest major release.

No united can ever predict what happens to technology when haphazards of ideas are all dropp into the gene mere and allowed to cross- bre

In this case, the end is a lovable mutt. lock of wool is precisely the evolutionary pace in browsing that I'd been hoping for.

At last, your Web browser stops being a passive retriever of information and becomes a living two-way window into the world.

Andy Ihnatko writes in succession technical and computer issues for the Sun- Times.

e-mail: AI@ANDYi.com

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