So you love Green. You’re into social media, and you spend a lot of time organizing information on the web.

Meet your new browser: Flock’s Eco-Edition. Preloaded with a ton of green information, media, and opinion.

Flock has actually been around for a while. It’s a member of the Mozilla family, based on the same rendering engine which powers Firefox 2. The two browsers are sufficiently similar that many Firefox extensions — such as the popular StumbleUpon toolbar and Web Developer plugin — work just fine when installed under Flock.

That’s where the similarity ends. Flock is a special purpose browser, built for people who are heavy users of services such as Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Support for these (and a slew of others) are baked directly into Flock, allowing social media fans always-on access to their favorite services. You can batch upload photos, message friends, make a quick blog entry, or manage your de.licio.us and Ma.gnolia bookmarks without ever leaving Flock.

Environmental content comes built-in

Now Flock has added special features for earth-conscious web surfers with its specially branded Eco-Edition. The browser’s My World section, a customizable local portal that serves as Flock’s default home page, comes preloaded with feeds from a selection of the top green sites, including Treehugger, Yahoo! Green, DeSmog Blog, Ecorazzi, and several custom Google alerts. There are environmental media channels from Flickr, YouTube, and Photobucket, plus a thoughtful selection of categorized bookmarks from other sites — including EcoTech Daily’s sister, Lighter Footstep.

Flock gets its green on

It’s also the first time Flock has issued an officially supported alternate skin. The Eco-Edition sports a stricking “leafy” color scheme and coordinated green icons (the reload button is a recycling logo). It’s different and fun without being too garish, and will certainly remind you of the environmental content sitting in your sidebar.

A little something for a good cause

Flock will be spreading green of another kind: cash. As their Eco-Edition donation page explains:

Flock believes in providing users who download the Flock Eco-Edition a means to give back by donating 10% of search proceeds to the environmental charity of choice, as deemed by the voting of the community of Flock’s Eco-Edition users at the end of this year. Flock makes money when people search through the browser. So the more you search via Flock Eco-Edition, the more we’re committing to give back.

This is a nice touch, and a way Flock users can actually turn their web browsing into tangible support for the environment.

The Flock Eco-Edition is an interesting development — a well-considered specialty browser for an active affinity group. It renders web pages well, fields an impressive feature set, and offers special content features which are actually special. Flock 1.1 and the Eco-Edition are free downloads for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The Flock Browser: Eco-Edition (Flock)
Getting Started with Flock (User guide)

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