Social-networking fiends and web 2.0-a-holics will likely have heard of Flock, the Firefox-based fork describing itself as a ‘social browser’ — which some say will change browsing as we know it.

Flock makes using social networking services and modern productivity services—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, GMail, Blogger, etc—alongside traditional web browsing activities easier through the use of sidebars, a dedicated media bar, and other icons.

When logging into a supported service, Flock lets you know you can integrate it into your browsing experience to stay up-to-date on posts, comments, pokes, statuses, tweets, shared photos, etc.

Flock also boasts an impressive integrated blog editor that can publish to Blogspot and WordPress; has its own native RSS feed reader; a bespoke home page; and lashings of web 2.0 style ‘drag and drop’ interactions to make uploading, downloading and ‘clipboarding’ files less fuss.

Also, since Flock is based on Mozilla Firefox, it comes with all the stability, performance and web compatibility benefits one would expect, and allows for the use of popular Firefox add-ons like Adblock Plus, Greasemonkey and Stylish.

I would say that if social networking and media sites aren’t your thing, you don’t blog, you get your mail in a desktop client, and you prefer to go find news rather than have it come to you via feeds, you don’t need Flock — just use regular Firefox.

But if you love the aforementioned aspects, you may find Flock the perfect fit.

The browser supports Windows, macOS and Linux, with third-party DEB installers provided for those of us on Ubuntu via the terrific GetDEB project.

Download the correct DEB that matches your system architecture and your Ubuntu version from the list below (Ubuntu 9.04 users should use the 8.10 builds – they work fine.)

  • Ubuntu 8.10 (32 bit)
  • Ubuntu 8.10 (64 bit)
  • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (32 bit)
  • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (64 bit)

Once your chosen DEB has fully downloaded you can double-click on it to install Flock (note: installing it will also add the Flock repo to your system sources to deliver future updates).

Installing Flock using a DEB means when if want to remove it you can do so easily, either using the Synaptic package manager (search for ‘Flock’ then click ‘uninstall’) or by running a quick sudo apt-get remove flock from the Terminal.

If you’d prefer to use the official Linux binary build, you can grab that from the official Flock website.

Let me know what you think of it in the comments!