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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."
They've upgraded their 4th rate website to a 3rd rate website. Clearly, we are witnessing the future.
End transmission.
What do you expect? It's obviously designed to appeal to clueless young people who see the web and internet as nothing more than an updated version of the old $2.99/minute local party line. It's the browser for those who like cliques and get off browsing through countless meaningless photos of people you've never met in person while sharing bookmarks with random people and reading about some random person's love-live - in all their failing grammatical glory and self infatuation.
I'm going to predict this will pretty much get a bit of hype, then slowly (or not so slowly) fade away into the mists of the Interweb.
Seriously. If there's one thing I think most people can agree on, it's that the number of successful web browsers seems bounded pretty low. You've pretty much got IE, Firefox/Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. I imagine that those are the only browsers showing up with at least 5% in server logs, but in the past there have been many more, some getting more attention than others.
People want to use mainstream browsers. Giving me quick access to something like a blog or Flickr isn't "innovative". A bookmark/favorite does the same thing with less overhead. I can get all sorts of functionality with Firefox and IE using extensions and ActiveX. If Flock is based on Firefox, but they don't plan to fork the codebase or do anything more than GUI changes and extension-cabable add-ons, then what's the point?
The Internet public has a way of weeding out browsers. The mainstream ones stay put (unless they get screwed by major corporations, *cough* Netscape 6 *cough*) and these amazing "new" ones go the way of the dodo. This one will be no different.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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These systems would also make ideal phishing grounds. Posting a fake "eBay" link ("look at this cool auction!!!") would take the target person to a faked eBay auction page (e.g with an IDN exploit) or just a scam domain (ebbay.com, etc.) that then asks for a eBay or Paypal password. Since many of the people that would follow a socially bookmarked eBay link are eBay/Paypal users the phisher would get a high hit rate.
Even if the system relies on some form of accumulated reputation or trust networks, its still possible for someone to cultivate a great reputation before abusing the system with spam or phishing.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Have a nice day and enjoy the VC money. Foosball rox!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
There are a lot of kids like that. It's not a bad market to tap, from a financial standpoint.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
They're doing much what most Linux distributions do. Except in this case the kernel is Firefox, and the supporting applications are the plugins. They're integrating all of these projects so that average users don't have to.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Every once in a while someone makes a +5 Insightful comment about how there should be a version of Firefox with the more popular extentions built in so that the average user gets more functionality and doesn't have to do all the work themselves.
Finally someone does it, and people are quick to start belittling it for not being something fantastic and earth shattering. It said straight up that it was based on Firefox.
It's not doing anything nasty like Netscape did, so this just means that there are more alternatives out there. Last time I checked, that was considered to be good around here.
Yep. How dare those people use the internet for Communicating! Everyone knows it was created with the sole purpose of COMMERCE!
I fully agree. I was expecting a lot more from this. I've used extensions that do almost all of these things.
In my book, you don't get points for redesigning a browser that was already written with a front end for a bookmarking system that was already written.
Yes, I know there are other features. See paragraph 1.
I was just having a lunch discussion about this sort of thing. One of our engineers was telling me how he couldn't care less about all this blogging social sharing fandangle.
Which is fair enough.
This web 2.0 is rather new. It's still trying to be defined. What we are seeing at this stage is new technologies that allow for a greater social interaction. Meanwhile the underlying systems are creating an emergent intelligence that can provide you with a greater experience.
It's a new technology and who else is better than understanding new technology than youngsters?
I still recall the time when cellphones were starting to become the mainstream. The older folk kept on asking why anyone would want such a device. Turn the clock forward and pretty much the entire younger generation at that time now has a cellphone. They identified the capability and found new uses for the technology.
This web 2.0 buzz is simply that cycle repeating. No one has anything against you not giving a care about these new systems. but. what you should do is stand aside while the people that embrace that "moved cheese" start to live a better and fully life using the technologies designed specifically for this purpose
To me, sharing bookmarks with myself across multiple computers is the main attraction of Flock. It's favorites feature also is an improvement over Firefox's classic-style of bookmarks which is just impossible to use when you get into hundreds of bookmarks. I like being able to tag bookmarks and search/browse them by tags.
As for community features. I'm not sure they belong merged into the browser but I'm not sure they don't either so it's a worthy experiment. I'm sure the better parts will get merged backwards into Firefox. Community sites shouldn't be a replacement for a social life but they can provide an extension of a social life. Obviously you're using Slashdot so you have no room to make fun of users of community sites.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
"(Preparing for the flamebait label from people who think that sharing your bookmarks, posting about your depressing emo life and sharing crappy photos substitutes for having a real social life... and think phone party lines are a great place to meet sexy singles for a night out on the town)."
A Slashdotter defining a "real social life" is like putting square wheels on a car. It looks funny, and it goes nowhere.
Anyone using IE is a prime demographic, and these are the kinds of features that can entice wouldn't-be users into checking out something other than IE. To be honest, you sound like an elitist prick, and that's precisely the attitude that turns people off from open source software.
If the giggling teenage masses switch to better browsers, everyone prospers.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Not 'getting' the Web 2.0 is dangerous for an engineer if they work in the web business or anything remotely related. It'd be like having been in the software business in 1994 and not seeing the big deal of that new thing called the web.
Enabling anyone to create, edit, and share is one of the defining premises of the web and it's only this premise that is deepening that really defines the new generation of web apps. I fully expect to see every kind of human-computer interaction pick up community features in the near future and become merged into the web browser.
A lot is made of the UI changes in the Web 2.0 (or AJAX, or whatever) and those are important but they are really only important so much as they improve the ability to communicate more complex things with more people quickly.
Not a good thing to ignore if you're job involves software, communications, or media.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
There are some good ideas here, especially the delicious intergration, "clip board" thingie and blog intergration.
And all of it could be done in FF extensions in just a few weeks (and hopefully will).
The rest of it is just a huge mess of poo with a few good ideas plopped into it. I think everyone should try it out, see what they did right and what they did wrong, and write some FF extensions for the rest of us to use. I can't beleive they got VC money for this, sorry guys. PS- I love the ability to switch collections on the toolbar, but can't figure out for the life of me why I cant open multiple tabs by middle clicking.
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
You know, not all teenage girls are complete idiots who TaLk LiEk tHiS all the time.
Just thought I should point that out...
</off-topic>
One of the biggest traps I have ever seen a geeky developer (and I use the term endearingly) fall into is that the whole world is going to love your product as much as you do.
It just doesn't happen that way unfortunately.
Firefox is probably close to market saturation because anyone who actually cares about their computer and likes to tinker with extension and RSS feeds is using it, but everyone else *just isn't concerned* and it totally passes them by.
Flock is just several orders of magnitude higher up the 'niche' market than that. By reading /. and similar boards all day, it may seem that the world is occupied by similarly minded geeks, but the sad truth is that it isn't.
The vast, vast, VAST majority of people are happy to buy a computer, turn it on and then double-click the icon on the desktop that mentions 'internet' and that is all they will ever do.
Saying that, I probably assume that the Flock developers don't realise that. Maybe they do and yet they still wish to develop a niche product. If that's the case then all power to them!
All well and good, but could we cut it out with the "Web 2.0"? It's like calling things "modern" back in the 1940s and '50s. It's all going to look quite silly when we wake up from it tomorrow.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
I don't know why the parent is modded a troll. I happen to agree that the vision of the internet falls short of its potential. In my opinion, Web 2.0 means a whole new paradigm, a revolution. Not the sort of thing that comes with fancier graphics, but the kind of thing where you suddenly realize there would have been no way to accomplish this with the previous version of the Web. It's like the day you realize that you use the internet every day, that the whole internet thing has become more than a luxury. Having an internet connected computer is as essential to relating to the modern world as having a TV was in the 80s and 90s. Web 2.0 will be the day where you go online and think "Wow, this is just amazing, I can do x, y, and z... none of that was even possible back with the first Web!"
It'll take a lot more than a slew of fancier looking applications with built-in-but-already-existing functions. I'm thinking a new protocol, new data compression methods, faster code. The kind of stuff you see on Firefly or Star Trek.
Umm no. You may as well say that moving from command-line batch processed software to GUI multi-tasking enviroments is about distributing content in a profitable manner. I'm sure that both these changes were hoped to be profitable but that is not the reason users care about them. As with anything you always have what the suits hope to get from the changes (which never changes.. greedy bastards) but that is not really the fundamental driving force behind those changes. The only reason those changes can be profitable is if they are delivering what end users are willing to pay to get.
End-users want the web to be more responsive, look nicer, offer more content, and make communicating easier and more fun. Delivering those things CAN make a profit but only because users are looking for those features.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
And all of "Web 2.0" - which works in IE - was possible 4-5 years ago, when "Web 1.0" was around.
Um, I think that del.icio.us is great in order to find out about sites, in order to recomment them to people, as well as a backup mechanism.
Besides, you obviously don't read many blogs. Many blogs, mine included, are for interesting stories, thoughts and ideas, as well as cool links and interesting net news. No real "depressing emo life". I keep my depresssion to myself, thank you very much.
My new blog
>Finally someone does it, and people are quick to start belittling it for not being
>something fantastic and earth shattering. It said straight up that it was based on
>Firefox.
Because it's different people doing the suggesting and the belittling?
Seriously, every time someone bashes on "blogs" it sounds to me like people bashing on television. Fine. Don't watch television. Or watch only the three or four shows you want to watch. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. The same thing is true of blogs. Don't want to see all of that trite bullshit that bothers you so much? Then don't read it!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I live in Las Vegas. If I based all my understandings on technology from conferences then of course I'd think that gold would rain from the sky, we'd all have hot model chicks wearing skimpy alien outfits and porting iPods as girlfriends, and all technology would be rather boring and useless other than as yet another means for suits to make endless gobs of money. Conferences and tradeshows do not define technology and they certainly don't pass along good technical information. They're more like the mold that grows around technology. All these terms (Web 2.0, AJAX, etc) are rather silly in general and are in the end just buzzwords. Despite that there is a real change in how web design is done taking place. Call it whatever you want. I like the version numbers as it most clearly states an improved, more feature rich, version of the existing web. That more functional web is what most people mean when they say Web 2.0, AJAX, etc. For all the difference it makes the marketing creeps could call it Bob.. it wouldn't be the first time Microsoft tried that.
Ads are nothing new on the web. I don't see that as being a defining point of any new web features.
I didn't catch any statement from Gates (as I mostly ignore the idiot) but you should realize that Bill Gates wouldn't know the future even if he spent a billion dollars to hire the world's experts to tell it to him. Ever read The Road Ahead? What a laugh. He is a copycat and not an innovator. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are both foolish ideas that are going to do naught but help the entertainment industry drive more nails in it's own coffin. Physical media is no longer needed and if it's prices stay high even as they take features (like the ability to backup my own property) away and ask us to buy expensive equipment to enable all this then many people will switch to something else. Hollywood style force fed entertainment is a failing idea. Collabortive entertainment is the way things will go. Enable end users to produce and share high-quality movies of their own and you'll have a winning product.
If you're just saying that you don't give a rats ass about Microsoft's (and other retarded companies) lame ass vision of what Web 2.0 is then I can agree with that. Writing it off as all marketing hype and money making schemes is a bit short sighted though. The first wave of the web was full of hype and crap but it still managed to make a serious change to our culture.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.