The Flock browser is based and built on from Mozilla, the same engine that powers the popular browser Firefox. But even so the two web browsers are very much different. Flock’s slogan is “the social web browser.” And that is very much true. Flock is a browser for more social-minded people and bloggers, like me, who like to keep everything just a few mouse clicks away.

With the Flock browser you can stay connected with all your friends from the major social websites such as Digg, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter, for example. You can easily share photos, links, text and videos with your friends. With its built-in blog editor you can post to your blog over at Blogger, Livejournal, Typepad, WordPress and many more. Flock also has an awesome RSS reader, which looks great if you got a larger monitor.

And with Flock’s eco-edition you can browse the web a little “greener.”

The Flock eco-edition is packed from the start with green blogs, green RSS-feeds, and news sites such as National Geographic, Treehugger, Ecorazzi, Green Yahoo! and many others.

If you decide to use the eco-edition 10% of all search engine-earnings generated by you and others who use the same edition will go towards an environmental charity.

“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.”

The eco-edition will also come with its own “green” skin. I personally don’t like this skin. And because somehow you can’t change to the more pleasant and default Flock browser skin I had to delete the eco-edition and download the default Flock browser. Of course I still kept all the green bookmarks and RSS-feeds.

The Flock eco-edition is a great browser if you can tolerate the “green” skin it comes with. It does misses a few good features that it’s “cousin” Firefox 3 has, but I guess that will be fixed when Flock 2 is released. I really recommend this browser to bloggers or people who often hang out at places such as Digg, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. The browser is free to download and use. It works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Junichi Sato is a well-known anti-whaling blogger in Japan and Greenpeace claims that this was, on the eve of the International Whaling Commission meeting, “an intimidation tactic by the government agencies responsible for whaling.” The Japanese media are, according to Brian from Making Waves, saying that this arrest is “a warning to other activist groups that as the G8 approaches, voices of dissent in Japan will not be tolerated.”

“This was not a police action – it was an intimidation tactic by the government agencies responsible for whaling – and the kind of harassment of whistleblowers that a modern democracy should not allow. Our first news that an arrest was imminent came from Japanese television stations. Someone leaked the information to ensure images of Greenpeace activists in handcuffs appeared on news reports in Japan.

More than 40 police officer raided our offices and the homes of the activists, and spent 10 hours seizing cell phones, documents, and computers, despite the fact that we had documented every step of how we obtained the whale meat, turned the full dossier over with the evidence, and made ourselves available to police to help with the investigation at any time. A simple phone call could have brought Junichi and Toru to the police station. Instead, the government made a public spectacle of shutting Greenpeace down.”

Jun Hoshikawa, Greenpeace Executive Director, says that the arrests are the counterattack from the Japanese Government for exposing the black market trade of stolen whale meat from the government-supported whaling fleet.

“This is the backlash. We’ve uncovered a scandal involving powerful forces in the Japanese government that benefit from whaling, and it’s not surprising they are striking back. What is surprising is that these activists, who are innocent of any crime, would be arrested for returning whale meat that was stolen from Japanese taxpayers. In whose interest were these arrests made? Because it would appear to us that this is an intimidation tactic by the government agencies responsible for a scandal.”

Greenpeace are now asking people to take action, they also demands that Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki will be released from custody and that the real criminals are put into jail instead.