Slashdot Mirror
Firefox-based Social Browser Flock Launches
daria42 writes "The much-hyped Flock, a new browser based on Mozilla Firefox and integrating features like RSS feeds, blogging tools, the del.icio.us social bookmarking and Flickr photo sharing services has just launched a public developer preview to the world. Flock is being driven by a team of developers being led by Bart Decrem, a well-known open source developer who co-founded the ill-fated Eazel project back in 1999 and has been involved with both the Mozilla and GNOME foundations. On his blog this week he says Flock won't be forking the Firefox codebase."
Web 2.0? It's just firefox with a few extensions and a different skin...
...to link to the web browser in question.
Just so web developers know, the User-Agent string of this browser (under Linux) is:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051019 Flock/0.4 Firefox/1.0+
So if you see it in your server logs, it's because the user is using Flock. If you do see it, please post here so we can gauge the spread of this browser.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
At least the HTML of their page is standards compliant:
k .com
o soft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.floc
Unlike that of Microsoft's Internet Explorer site:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://www.micr
But then again, that's not surprising.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I thought the same thing until I actually tried the Flock Developer Preview that was just released. (I'm posting this from it now.)
I was all set to be unimpressed but I have to tell you, it's pretty impressive if you have a blog how easy they have made posting Web content to it. There's a "shelf" tool, for starters, that you use by just highlighting any text on a page and dragging-and-dropping it into the Shelf. Then, when you want to post about that text, you just click the "Blog this" button on the toolbar; this opens a new post (Flock autodetects the settings for your blog, so there's no configuration if you use most popular packages) in a WYSIWYG editor. Drag the text from the shelf into the editor and it pops the text in, encloses it in BLOCKQUOTE tags, and adds the cite="" attribute with the URL from the original page.
Revolutionary? Maybe not. But it's so damn slick! Currently when I blog something I copy it from Firefox into an HTML editor (Movable Type's built in editor sucks), mark it up there, log into the admin screen for my blog, then paste the marked-up text into a new post. Oh, and then I have to go back and find the original URL, copy it, and paste it in the appropriate pages. That's a lot of back and forth that Flock eliminates.
Some people use a tool like MarsEdit or wBloggar to combine the "markup" and "posting" steps together in one place. But Flock puts all the features of those products right in my browser -- no switching between programs, no copy/paste gymnastics. There's a market for those products, so it's not a big leap to imagine a market for Flock, either (albeit a small one).
It'll be interesting to see how well Flock holds up to ongoing use over time. But my first impressions are better than I expected them to be. You might want to try it too before you pass judgement...
(Random other observation: Flock changes the default engine for the Firefox search box from Google to Yahoo! A political statement? Is Yahoo! connected to Flock somehow? Veeery interesting...)
Read my blog.
I got a copy of Flock, so here are my thoughts.
What I like:
The default theme is much prettier than any Firefox theme I've seen. Not a big deal, but it is nice to not have to search through a ton of themes to get one that's aesthetically pleasing.
At the right side of the bookmark toolbar is a drop down menu, where you select don't make me weak at the kneesthe folder to view, and that folder's contents show up in the bar. Sure not one of the great innovations of our time, but I love it. Already I use it more than I ever used the bookmark menu. I would be delighted if Mozilla merged this into Firefox.
Another thing that Firefox has been missing is searchbar history. It's one of those small things that can really make the difference in your user experience.
They also have the option to bring back the find as you type bit, and I've only had one instance where it tries to start searching when I'm typing in a textbox.
Things that I'm neutral towards or dislike:
I'm not a big blogger or del.icio.us user, so those features don't excite me overmuch.
That said, the built-in interface to Blogger simply doesn't work. You try to open an old post and supposedly all the text in it is "2005".
When playing with the blogging applet, at times I would get CPU usage of ~98%.
Beyond the bookmark toolbar, the rest of the favorites interface is cluttered and stuff that I would never use.
The CSS implementation is a bit sketchy (though still better than IE, in my opinion).
But hey, they gave fair warning that there are some major bugs. Hopefully most of these will be fixed up by 1.0.
for those of you asking what the hype is all about. here's what we've got so far that's different in Flock:
1. replaces old-school bookmarks with one-click social bookmarking to Del.icio.us
2. tagging is there if you want to do two-click bookmarking and tag
3. a new bookmarks manager with an integrated rss reader
4. built in search engine that indexes every page you visit and has a Spotlight-style as-you-type UI
5. keeps a list of the sites you visit most frequently
6. multiple bookmarks toolbar (one for work, one for play etc.)
7. finds feeds, lets you view them
8. caches the feeds so you can read them on the train
9. aggregated RSS view for all of your bookmarks folders
10. integrated blog editor (support wordpress, movable type, blogger)
11. one click 'blog this' feature (it does the blockquotes, citations and all that stuff for you)
12. Flickr integration (drag and drop pix into blogs)
13. shelf: a web scrapbook that helps you organizae stuff you want to blog
and of course it's open source and cross platform.
details at http://www.flock.com/fiveways/togetstarted/13.php
you go there and browse the page and when you find what you want, it is literally a one-click download-and-install
It's a bad user experience on several levels.
1. 'extensions' brings up a small window with 3 buttons and a link - the link is the different one (smallest visual appearance) that brings you to an extension place.
2. The procedure isn't one click, as I get a fairly scary warning box saying to not install software from places I don't trust. Should I trust the extension? Pretty much every extension out there is 'unsigned' (probably because learning how to sign things is a big PITA, and is going to cost people some $ as well)
3. People looking for extensions may also wind up on mozdev, and the popup blocker in firefox blocks pretty much every attempt at installing an extension that way because it's a new popup and you have to grant popup permissions to that URL.
Having many 'standard' plugins focused on serving a particular market bundled in to a browser is a great idea.
2 other things I'd like to see are file upload progress meters standard (and big and visible) and a built-in media capture (sound recorder) which would allow forms to capture sound for forum posting attachments.
creation science book
One of defining features of each "web 2.0" application has been that it has done a good job of hype, either by creating "invites" (gmail) or merely letting the web equivalent of word of mouth spread use around (del.icio.us).
.
I've been following Flock ever since the site launched. I read preview after preview from web 2.0 people who claimed Flock would be God's gift to the modern age, better than parasols or flying airships or rockets to the moon. So, of course, I downloaded it with great haste yesterday only to discover . .
. . . that it is little more than an AJAX-esque skin for Firefox with some "fancy" extensions, fancy meaning slow and unworkable. Marshall McLuhan, media genius and internet saint, said that hot media burns fast and clear, shining for only a moment and then gone. Well, friends, Flock is hot in the McLuhan sense. It was best experienced as an anticipation, not as something that has actually arrived. The reality is that Flock is flying lame.
What the Flock people should have done is release it quietly to a few developers, let them test it under promise of silence, and then when they had something worth screaming about - screamed then, and only then. Instead, they screamed before they had anything, in the sense that they posted flickr screenshots, and whipped up the blogosphere in orgasmic anticipation.
I felt cheated trying Flock, and vindicated when I uninstalled it. I've been very impressed with Web 2.0 so far, or whatever it is they're calling webpages on the internet that are well coded, but if Flock is the future I want out.