Flock, the New Browser on the Block

^tamago^ writes to tell us BusinessWeek Online is reporting that a new browser is stepping into the arena. This new competitor, Flock, hopes to change the face of web browsing by turning their's into the swiss army knife of browsers. From the article: "Flock's browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn't satisfied passively browsing media online. Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online"

Comments

more competition should be a good thing, I hope

[yagu]

First most obvious question to me is, will it run on Linux? No mention in the article, and their web site is coy (and a little annoying in its design). It does mention "cross platform tastiness", and "written in java", so I'm hoping.

That said, my biggest worry is browser extensions that start relying on non-standard implementation, i.e., they begin to have affinity for things not-html, not-javascript, things not-css. I know the browser universe is a hodge-podge of standards already, I just would hate to see yet another trailblazer that ends up to be some extension of some proprietary idea.

Anyway, to the new browser and its team, welcome to our flock. Best of luck.

No Invite

[AKAImBatman]

Lots of wild promises, requires an invite, they can't develop a web page worth a crud, and their "extentions" page screams "FireFox". Me thinks that this isn't as ground breaking as their PR department will have you believe. We'll see, though.

Re:No Invite

[JonTurner]

Look on the bright side. Three years ago, investors would have been throwing money their way without a pause. Now all they get is \. ridicule and suspicious glares. Perhaps the right balance is somewhere between the two extremes. Deliver a little product, show us something, and then we'll decide. Right now it looks like "Too little, too soon."

I guess it's true, as they say in the comedy business "timing is everything."

Yuck

[MightyMartian]

Well, all I can say is that if the web site is any indicator of the design talents of its creators, I don't hold much hope for the "swiss army knife" of browsers.

Re:Yuck

[Iriel]

If my hunch is correct, then the 'designers' are going for some ill conceived sort of mystique to intrigue people into checking out what it is. Personally, I think this tactic wouldn't be so bad except here's a few problems I have with their implementation:

  - The type is too big for any sort of mysterious appeal. If they want people to become interested by being vauge, then the text HAS to be smaller and not so pretentious.

  - Even with the plot to intrigue the user, one has to give away more information than they already don't to at least let you know "wtf". For example, when rogaine first aired commercials in the US, it advertised itself as 'rogaine with monoxodil' as some product to turn your life around, but instead of people asking where to sign up, everyone called to ask 'what the fuck is it?' and ended up being more annoyed than anything else.

  - Lastly, people hate the idea of giving away their digital identity (email) just to test a browser. Hint to the creators: You're not Apple, and as such, you are not going to get everyone to sign up for an invite to feel special in your exclusive club despite secrets handshakes and a password. Give the beta out there with a disclaimer, and an open invitation to test and give feedback instead of trying to be some underground organization, and learn to use colors better ^_^

Re:Yuck

[MightyMartian]

I'm guessing you're not a designer.

I'm guessing neither are the people that designed this website.

Current trends in typography show this as an interesting design choice.

Oh yeah, it's the design of the future. Pretty soon all websites will look like they were made by Coco the Gorilla.

If you see some art opening or club postcards you'll see this style a lot. Large helvetica or arial type with very little leading.

Was this supposed to recommend it somehow?

This is a marketing decision. I don't think they did this because they couldn't do something more elaborate.

If this was a marketing decision as opposed to sheer incompetence, then I think this browser has even less hope.

Great!

[Moth7]

A link to a story about a press release for a private beta. Stuff that matters? Not really. Wake me up when the browser is publically available.

I won't flock to it...

[achacha]

Mozilaa doesn't want to sell me anything and it's a great browser and has a huge head start on these guys... I'll pass thank you. This sounds to me like an idea that the clueless were buying into about 8 years ago.

Holy shit!

[lilmouse]

That's an *impressively* obnoxious page design!

Everyone kept complaining, but I didn't believe it. Wow! They should win an award or something...

Maybe an award for "Most awful commercial example of minimalist website design".

Wow.

I'll grant it's readable...well, maybe light grey on white with yellow thrown into the mix is bad too. I hope they hire a graphic designer!

--LWM

Indiana Jones and the Portal of Doom

[decipher_saint]

To me it seems like a browser with a built in portal. What happens if your blog violates the terms of service? No more surfing for you?

Personally, I'd rather have seperate tools than one big web-a-majig anyway.

Slashdot: The newest shill on the block!

[RexRhino]

That's right... News for Nerds, and Stuff that matters, and now the coolest place to get corporate press releases and sponsered product reviews!

The Web Browser of the Future is not a Web Browser

[LionKimbro]

I am actually sympathetic to the basic idea here: New platform.

I'm newly skeptical of the approach of endlessly creating side-systems on the web browser.

There are amazing things that are possible when you make a new platform for integrating ideas.

For example, we can envision a world where you can watch people writing blog posts as they write them. We can imagine working on documents together with others in real-time. We can imagine social networks, we can imagine shared web browsing. We can imagine going to a web page, and seeing other people who happen to be browsing the web page at the same time as well. We can imagine looking at them, seeing what their affiliations are; There are all these things. We have seen voice communication. Within 10 years, good voice synthesis will be coupled, and we'll be able to look and sound like anybody.

Now, what we haven't seen, even in our imaginations, is all this stuff working together. Integrated into one platform.

Doing this stuff piece-meal, a little bit at a time, on the edge of the network, isn't going to work. It's just not. It'd take forever. Building new standards into the existing network just takes forever. There is no design team. Nadah. Nothing.

Where we see the cool stuff happening, really, is in these large behemeouth new platform.

Now, sure, we can get some milage out of AJAX. We can do sophisticated things with that.

But are we really going to make a 3D world with live document editing, voice & synthesis, presence, infinite versioning on everything, avatars, the whole thing, yadda yadda yadda, using just AJAX? Within 10-15 years? Hell no! It takes at least at least 5 years to make a new specification pretty much standard amongst users. Even RSS aggregators have only 10% penetration amongst blog readers.

What does this mean? It means that a new platform is in the works. Whether you know it or not, a new platform is in the works. Which of the new upstarts is going to be it, remains to be seen.

Sure, sure, sure-- there will be gateways between the world of Vanilla HTML + AJAX into these new worlds.

At some point, you can make a computer render pictures of the new world, and ship them off in AJAX. You can even play Lemmings in the browser now. (Well, you could have...) But the new world is going to be built in the new world. It's not going to be built piecemeal out here in weblandia. When we use browsers to access it, it will be a window into that world, but it will not be that world.

Re:So how will it generate sales?

[Kelson]

Actually, it sounds like Opera's old revenue model. And while most site owners didn't mind (or weren't even aware of it), there were indeed a few who objected to that model on exactly those grounds (competing Google ads) and blocked access from Opera users. At least some of them had the sense to stop blocking it after they dropped the ads.

Re:They ripped off 37signals

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not seeing the logo similarity, sorry. So they both used stupid huge fonts, who cares they both suck.

DEAR FLOCK, meet firefox extensions...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Flock's browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn't satisfied passively browsing media online. Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online" DEAR FLOCK, meet firefox extensions.

Plain English for Aunt Gert

[HisMother]

From the site blog:

People I know seem not really to know what I do for a living. They know it has to do with computers, and most of them know I'm working on software, and many know that I'm doing something with browser software. In a nutshell, here's what my company does: Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating

Sigh. Yep. Tell them that. It's "a dashboard for collaborating". That'll convince those non-computer-savvy neighbors! Let's see what Aunt Gert thinks:

A dashboard is that place in the car where I keep my plastic Virgin Mary. There's also some dial thingies I occasionally look at, although half of them I'm not sure what they do. And "collaborating", I don't even know what that means, although it sounds a little illegal.

Why do geeks simply never say "It's a way to work together with your friends over the Web!" Why do we have to use nonsense words like "dashboard" and "collaboration" when there are perfectly lovely plain English substitutes?

swiss army knife of browsers

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> swiss army knife of browsers

Swiss army knives have great portability and lousy tools. I think I'll stick with a browser that's made only for browsing, thanks.

Re:Invalid markup, to boot.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I just went to a lot of effort to design a web page which does not validate. The page, which is designed to look good in any browser, does not validate for the following two reasons:

• No DOCTYPE, since I want the tables which I use for some of the layout to look the same in legacy browsers (e.g. Netscape) as it does in modern browsers.
• TD in a table without a TR, since putting the TR in the table makes the page look worse in Lynx (it causes the last line in a table to indent)

The point being: Having a page 100% validate is not as important as having the web page look good in a given browser. Most people read web pages with browsers, not by reading the raw HTML and imagining how that page will look in a hypothetical non-existent CSS 2.1 compliant browser.

Re:Covering the bases

[ilyaaohell]

How exactly can I do something "wrong" with a web browser?

Re:Invalid markup, to boot.

[HorsePunchKid]

The only inconvenience was having to read CyricZ's worthless post. I'll take a page (like yours) with mildly broken but very legible, maintainable markup over a perfectly valid page with hideous markup anyday. I'll give you one guess which kind has been more common in my experience... ;)

Good luck with your work, and don't let the Slashdot trolls get you down!