New, alternative browser Flock has finally been released. My attempts to get an earlier beta version were firmly rebuffed despite my best efforts.

If you haven’t heard of Flock, there are a few articles that will bring you up to speed: Wired, Business Week, Paul Stamatiou.com and Solution Watch.

It’s based on the Firefox 1.5 beta but offers a much more friendly, Web 2.0 view of the net. I fooled around with the mac version before work and continued at work with the Windows version. I found it mildly amusing that the Windows version only offered to import Internet Explorer favorites. Any one who is still using that POS has no intention of switching to a new browser. Certainly not one as new and untried as this one.

From what I’ve been reading it’s not too stable and they have labeled it a ‘developer version 0.4.9′ so crashes should be expected. Still it looks really cool and integrates nicely with a number of web services like del.icio.us, Flickr and the world of blogs.

It’s not ready for prime time just yet but it looks promising. I think I’ll start to test the nightly builds much as I did in the early days of what was to become Firefox. It’s been a long time since I’ve done that but I still have my Bugzilla account. I think.

A weekend of geeking out is afoot…