A small group of programmers in Palo Alto, several of them Mozilla veterans, have been toiling away on Flock, a new open-source web browser, readying what they call a "social browser" - because it "plays nicely" with popular web services like Flickr and Technorait - for a beta launch in early October, reports Wired. Flock will feature drag-and-drop blogging tools and promises to detect and authenticate user accounts automatically, among many other features.

Browsers were all about navigating through a web conceived as a library, but now, according to Flock's Bart Decrem, "Web 2.0 is a stream of events, people and connections." A better browser is one that will understand this new user environment - and Flock does, he says.

The Flock team speaks of moving back to the original vision of web founder Tim Berners-Lee, that the web should be a two-way experience.