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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."
Hmm... it has gradients... it has shadows... why, this must be Web 2.0!
Hi cuntaxes.
It's the Eastlake Bar and Grill!
Arglebargleglopglyph.
The "Go back" and "Go forward" buttons have merged into an all powerful "stay here" button.
Third post!
This can only benefit Firefox...
Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. -Heinlein
RSS feeds, blogging tools, the del.icio.us social bookmarking and Flickr photo sharing services has
So, other than RSS feeds, basically nothing someone other than a teenage girl would care about? Why not throw in some sort of LiveJournal, MySpace, Faces, MakeoutClub functionality while you're at it, too -- so you can really nail that prime demographic?
(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 social browser is what you contract from visiting too many websites.
They've upgraded their 4th rate website to a 3rd rate website. Clearly, we are witnessing the future.
End transmission.
Web 2.0? It's just firefox with a few extensions and a different skin...
...is an anti-social browser.
...to link to the web browser in question.
Am I the first to think "Flock Off!"?
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.
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
/)
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.
Despite the dour response that will happen on /., I believe that it is necessary that such things as this happen. Forget your toolbar crap, get an entire browser based on the things that you want to do on the web. This is just the other side of the coin when you look at web based software business... a web browser that completes your business needs.. look for more of the same, and some of them actually being exciting!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
IMO there's no reason to make another fork of firefox especially when all this functionality can easily be accomplished with _plugins_.
I agree that this is just FF with a skin and some plugins.
If they really want to be a "social" browser, why'd they overlook BitTorrent?
Is this a group that can only make skins? I know there isn't (that I've found) a FF plugin for BT, but would it really be hard for a group that supposes to make a better browser?
put the what in the where?
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.
and stop grandstanding. that's all you're developing here. plugins and a skin.
wow, you're not forking Firefox. how novel. here i never thought of plugins forking an app.
In a3dition,
...led by Bart Decrem...
That should be Badr Decrem.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
built in blogging tools, plus you can highlight text/urls/images, right click and choose 'blog this'. I like the 'shelf' allot; a small window that allows you to drag blocks of text to blog with later. favorites automatically upates your del.ico.us bookmarks - that's nifty...it sorta feels like a pimped out FF with a bunch of extentions, but they are pretty helpful, and cool if you want to blog allot. will it change the world? no, but it may allow ppl to work more efficiently with their online browsing/colaboration.
fak3r.com
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.
From installation to uninstallation in 10 minutes...
Yeah, I've already got a browser that works for me. Thanks anyway flockers...
I remember someone giving a presentation on social bookmarking at my school. It seemed like it might be pretty useful - like bittorrent, it gets more useful the more people use it.
Adding better built in features is the way to go to beat internet explorer.
I gave it a try today. It's crap. Firefox is a thousand times better. Why the hell did the VCs fund this company? Why? They just flocked... err, flushed their money down the toilet.
It makes me think of "frock", as in "defrock". Indeed, perhaps this will become a tool that Catholic priests will use to entice teen boys with.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I just wish that atelast half the interest and enthusiasm shown on Firefox/its variants is also shown on the crappy email client Thunderbird...Its nowhere near its hype and is total BS product as compared to Outlook.
I uninstalled Netscape 8 in less time than that. :-)
I might be on speed; I'm not sure. But this thing seems to render pretty damned fast in OS X. Faster than Firefox. Faster than Safari (what isn't?)
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
All I've heard about Flock is vague statements about how cool it's going to be, but no actual description of what it does. Their website is studiously uninformative. I guess the idea is that we're supposed to download it, try it and then we'll geddit. First one's free, right?
What about antisocial trolls? When is that Firefox version?
"(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.
About blogging/RSS feeds/whatever, because most of them will:
a) Install the plugin that meets the features they need
or
b) Stay the hell away from blogs, which are the 21st century equivalent to "MY FIRST WEBPAGE OMG!" pages.
People who feel the need to share every detail of their lives have self image issues.
While you, as a technical person, might struggle with the theme, I'm sure they've done research into this matter and found that it's very usable for your average emo teen.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
This will be a HUGE flash ... but will suffer as soon as their back end servers are crushed under the weight of all the new "blogs" created.
... before they attempt to sell-out to some bigger company. It's all about the bandwidth, baby.
I'm posting this from Flock right now. It doesn't even have a "stop" button, but it does have an option "blog editor".
It didn't offer to auto-import my FireFox bookmarks, but it did offer to import IE (on Windows).
I think this will be all about how much stress their servers can handle
As if we really needed more bloggers in the world...
I totally just came up with a new word that emo teen freaks can use: flock'd! It's when your blog is innundated with hits from other Flock-using emo punks because your woe-is-me blog just hit 3rd place on the Flock Top Ten Blogs list.
That, or when you're playing football and you get cleats square in your gonads. You're flock'd then, too.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
DUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUPPPPEE!!!111111one http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/05/181724 8
Life is offtopic.
YIPPEEE!! I MADE THE 90TH POST!! I rule!!!
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.
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.*
I have a del.icio.us account, which I use so I can see my bookmarks on each of the four boxen (work, laptop, games, web) I work with. I _need_ my bookmarks; my memory is shite and I'm programming 10 different things every week so I need an easy way to access my knowlegdebase. Before that I was moving around a huge bookmarks toolbar folder from fox to fox, which sucked. I also run dual/triple boot on pretty each machine, so suddenly that's 10 installs I have to sync bookmarks to. So del.icio.us rocks, right? And I've never gotten foxylicious to work successfully (i.e. at all) so after flock _just worked_ I'm pretty happy.
I also have a flickr account - hey look flock just got more useful for me.
I need to start a weblog as well; I'm an uncommunicative bastard who doesn't call his family so it should be an easy (i.e. one button) way to keep people up to date. and yes, I have issues with the blog concept as much as the next guy but I need to get over it and join the 21st century. A few blogs (kottke,waxy,idlewords,girlyounasty) are a genuine source of goodness for me. that and the technical blogs which are more necessary than even now that google has butchered usenet.
I'm also a news junkie, and my google.com.ig page is packed with feeds. one more tick for the flockster
flock should hopefully make all this easier... and if not what did I lose apart from the oppurtunity to whine like a bitch about how I'm incapable of embracing technological progress?
Flock had me skeptical from the screenshots (ugly and useless), but having actually used it, it's pretty gosh darn neat. The Shelf is an incredible killer feature. I've tried out a few similar extensions for Firefox, but none did it as smoothly and intuitively as Flock has. All it needs is a few hardcore snippet-management-tools, and it'll be my new favorite research program.
Likewise, the blog editor falls under the "pretty neat" status. The formatting gets eaten by Wordpress.com's post-parser (to filter out nasty javascript and other malicious evil), but that isn't a major downer, as it does tend to exhibit some weirdness like underline remaining after deleting a link. The WYSIWYG-editor part of it definately needs some work to be up to par with the rest of the browser.
Overall, I've been seriously impressed. For being a the first public release of a browser, it's feature-filled and non-crashy. This must be attributed to it being based on Firefox. All it needs is a few months of polish and I can unconditionally accept it as my new primary browser. As is, I'm giving the idea serious thought.
P.S.: I didn't use the del.icio.us integration, as I didn't really use the service much before. But now that it's seamlessly integrated into the browser, I'll try it out again.
I predict that within a month, someone will hack out an extension or extensions for Firefox that do what Flock does. Then, it will be obviated.
Fucking christ. Most of the posts are just smug tech elitists whining about how it caters to "emo teens" or saying something like "Just what we need, more bloggers". The web is fucking huge, and I'd be surprised if there are twenty Slashdotters that haven't developed excellent crapflood filters by now. You don't read the Xangas and LiveJournals and Bloggers, so why are you complaining?
Someone went and turned a browser from a window through which you can view the web to an application where you interact with parts of it (among the most popular parts these days) more intuitively. And you look beyond how neat that is because you want to look down your noses at the emo teens. Fucking class act.
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
In Soviet Russia, Browser Socialises You!
XML - A clever joke would be here if
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!
...for the last few minutes.
Is it just me, or is this thing noticeably faster than Firefox 1.0.7? Can anyone comment on how the speed compares to FF 1.5 beta?
I got Flock. I made a delicious account aas it said to. I set up that account in Flock.
Now I have no idea how to make Flock show me the tags delicious users are putting on pages.
None of the getting started with Flock pages help me. I don't seem to be made aware anywhere that any major website has tags I can see.
Forget your toolbar crap, get an entire browser based on the things that you want to do on the web.
Are we going full circle and just reinventing AOL or other online services applications? We're coming back to the "online service application" -- the one program used for email, viewing information, "everything" you can do online....
Web 2.0 = Coke 2.0
There is already a social bookmarking/site rating system for Firefox. It is called Outfoxed . Definitely worth a try.
"Users want simplicity", well, I'm aghast. Firefox has the link to the Mozilla extensions/plug-in site right in the toolbar, you go there and browse the page and when you find what you want, it is literally a one-click download-and-install. In a single step. If that's too complicated for somebody, how are they using a web browser at all? Seriously, I've taken people who can do *nothing* else with a computer and shown them how to do extensions and they learned it in one shot.
I'm not knocking Flocker (I wouldn't want to be labeled a Flocker-knocker!). But I'm going to wait until there's a few more feature anouncements before *I* go to the (oh! soooo complicated! ah, the drudgery!!!) trouble of downloading and unzipping and configuring and makeing and suing and make installing the source tarball.
The RSS pane is almost one third of the whole browser. I can imagine that in the version 4.0 the classical browsing window will be removed and all we will ever need is the SUPERHEAVY support for RSS and shopping cart + one input field for your favorite RSS search engine :-)
Is the time of "death of classical web pages" near? Will everything in the future be just the XML/RSSv8.1/XMLShopping Protocol/... resources and the rest (displaying, stylizing, aggregating) is left up to your browser?
Maybe. We'll see.
(But I still and always will love to design my own unique webs no matter what...)
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
I've downloaded Flock and played with it. I'm wondering why they don't implement all those neat functions as Firefox extensions instead of a seperate browser application. Imagine you have both (Firefox and Flock) on your local machine and security updates must be installed, then you have to install them for both.
D.
No, this isn't a troll. I'm primarily a Windows users, but right now I'm posting this from Ubuntu Linux.
I've noticed that when someone complains about there being "too many Linux distros", the standard response seems to be, "choice is good," which get rated up.
Now, I agree, but... here we have, more than likely, the same people who defend the large number of Linux distros complaining about "too many web browsers."
Did I miss a memo?
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
I've heard the phrase "web 2.0" so many times it's not funny. What is it exactly?
Let's see, this looks like a useful page:
we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:
Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication
It seems like a vague way of saying that Google is successful, people like blogs and other social networking systems, and that there's a lot of hype around AJAX. What a load of crap.
There seems to be a wordpress account being thrown in .... any ideas what thats all about?
.... back in the old days, when metamachine started their edonkey2000 client and p2p network, some guys coded a client of their own for this network, and called it flock for starters...
later this project became the emule-project.net and you all know about emule, the open source client for the edonkey2000 network.
i think flock is rather a bad name for a new project, when it has already been used in the past for very different things.
From the brief description, I don't see anything in Flock that doesn't already exist as Firefox extensions. In fact, I find it hard to imagine a feature that couldn't be provided as a Firefox extensions, since Firefox is basically just a set of "extensions" running in a generic XUL runtime.
Does anybody know any technical reason why this needs to be a new browser, instead of being Firefox shipped with a bunch of pre-installed add-ons?
What does RSS and sharing stuff have to do with "The Web 2.0". RSS is just an XML technology... we've had those for a long time.
I downloaded and installed flock to see if it eats less memory than firefox. infortunately, it seems flock and firefox consumes nearly 150 megs of RAM even if they're inactive. I love firefox, i hate IE but i can't stand this behaviour. I found a little browser called maxthon based on IE but with all firefox features (adblocking, mouse gestures, very friendly customizable...ana a lot of things cool for geeks. using it consumes 5 to 20 megs of RAM. That's a lot better than firefox and even opera.
Sorry, i love firefox but i want back my RAM
I don't have interest in maxthon. Try it, you'll love it.
I'm not sure If I'm doing it right, but here is my blog/webquotes/(no pictures yet)/favorite sites...
I don't like having to give a link to my favorite sites, I want the list to be on my blog...Anybody know how to do this? (from the delicious) (oh btw here is my flock http://hexagram.wordpress.com/
Ah yes, Eazel. That had a successful business model. I have no doubt that Flock's business model will be just as successful... in throwing other people's money down the toilet.
"Information wants to be paid"
Well this is a good start in creating a customised version of FIrefox.
But what I'd like to see is a version of Firefox where I don't have to see that irritating little yellow bar every time I go to a website that has Flash on it. Especially since after doing my last upgrade to version 1.0.7 on my Linux box the "about:config" "plugin.default_plugin_disabled=True" no longer works.
Fuck me that's one annoying "feature". So big note to the Firefox devs:
NO I DO NOT WANT TO FUCKING INSTALL FUCKING FLASH SO STOP FUCKING NAGGING ME ABOUT IT.
Your popup blocker works as it should, your plugin manager is a retard that thinks it's been incorporated into Microsoft code.
The internet... slowly being ruined by popups, spam, crappy flashvertising, nagging browsers...
At least there's still links.
I was waiting for the browser with great expectations. But after reading this comparison between Firefox and Flock at the link below -
x perimental-web-browser-for.html ... I have decided that I will start using it when it reaches ver 1.0
:)
http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2005/10/flock-new-e
Just my two bits.
With all the recent hype surrounding the new social web browser Flock, I thought I'd take a second to let everyone know about the other social web browsing experence, Flocq. While not yet as polished as Flock, Flocq is growing rapidly with only 4 total hours from idea to code to qa to public launch. Check out Flocq at http://flocq.100free.com/
Interesting - yes - earth shattering - no flocking way... I'm just Flocking glad there is another Flocking browser choice out there... That's a good Flocking thing... If you disagree... well then Flock You!
although I doubted the usefullness of this browser at first, I have to say the search functions, bookmarking methods, tags etc are very nicely intergrated.
The browser has a clear purpose. If you are merely interested in aggregating information from sites, than this might well be your browser.
It kinda feels like an iMac among browsers...in alpha stage then... but a step in the right direction nonetheless.
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
You can get the flock releases from torrent.ibiblio.org via bittorrent streams.
Enjoy and enjoy faster legal, authoratative, reliable and persistant torrents.
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
"The Mozilla Foundation has alluded to search related business arrangements and has created a for-profit subsidiary [Known as Mozilla Corporation]."
...
It's a slipery slope:
-Create Mozilla Corporation (Check)
-Taste flavour of profits
-do evil things (adware/spyware)
-Get more profits
-become really evil (??)
? (i dunno, I've already used Profit twice)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with this thing. I created a del.icio.us acocunt. I installed it. I'm using it, I can browse just like with any other browser.
I "imported" my IE bookmarks. But I can't find them. NONE of them. Where did they go? I imported my Firefox bookmarks (had to export to Opera, then import from Opera, I can't import direct from Firefox?). But again, I can't find them.
So far, not terribly impressed simply because I can't find the stuff I just imported.
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 would switch to this browser in a second if they added the killer feature of all browsers...
When I Ctrl+N (open a new window), it would duplicate the page I was at before, AND copy over the Next / Previous histories. Flock currently does the standard firefox thing of opening the default home with no back/forward histor
Does anyone know a browser other than IE that does this? It cant be that hard, really. Even if it was just a preference to turn on and off.
I really hate IE, but keep on using it for this feature alone since it matches my browsing style.
Who gives a rat's ass? Thes guys missed the boat on this type of thing a long time ago.
A lot of the features don't appeal to me, but the favorites system with integrated tagging and auto delicious syncing is really freaking nice. Unfortunately I must have come across a nasty bug because after a few restarts of the browse (not from crashes), suddenly the favorites menu stopped working, both in the menu bar and the star icon itself. :( But from what use I had, ~ an hour or so, I really liked that aspect.
:D
Also the search box in the top right, it searches your history and your favorites a la "google suggest" and find-as-you-type. And if you want to actually search the internet, then you just hit return and it takes you to google or whatever. I thought it was well done and creative.
As I saw someone else said also, the default theme is pretty nice, which is saying something considering how god awful most themes are. I didnt like the look of the buttons so much but the tabs were sexy and the gradient was subtle enough to actually be good. I would probably prefer just the default Firefox look over it but all things considered they did a good job.
Like I said a lot of the other features don't really appeal to me, but MAN OH MAN do we need an overhaul of the bookmarking system, and I think Flock is on the right track. I will definitely check it out again once it hits 1.0.
Joseph?
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.
This is so typical of crowd here at slashdot. The idea of even trying the browser is secondary to getting your cynical, acerbic and arrogant posts on the site.
.4 was a pretty good browser, but needed some work before I could use it all the time.
It's about choice, you fools. You are bitching and whining about people being given another browser choice. It's hypocritical and ironic that nearly every post in this article is full of some weird blind rage about people blogging, or using other community services. What in the hell do you think slashdot is? Sure, it's fun to ridicule the emo crowd, but just because they blog, it doesn't make the rest of the bloggers useless.
That said, *GASP*, I actually gave Flock a try and you know what, it's a nice browser. A few more point releases and this might be my main browser at home. I fondly remember when FF
Some of the good stuff:
Bookmark synchronization across browsers: This completely rocks. I can easily keep my bookmarks up to date in all my flock browsers, home, work, wherever I am. There is only one FF extension that I know of that does this and it does it poorly. The only caveat is that your bookmarks are public, so internal company bookmarks would be visible to the public, but to me the impact is minimal since my internal company bookmarks point to non-routable private ip addresses behind firewalls.
Bookmark tagging: As the mass of people who use Google mail know, tagging is far better than filing things in folders. I can now sort and group my bookmarks without having to deal with the tedious task of pouring through them, moving them to folders, etc.
Custom bookmark toolbars: This is one of my favorite features. Instead of the bookmark folders you have in Mozilla/Firefox, Flock uses what they call collections. Flat groups of bookmarks in the bookmark manager. The cool thing is that via a drop down menu, you can pick a collection to appear in the bookmark toolbar. Working? Reading the news, viewing porn? Just pick the collection you need to use.
User interface: The default skin is much nicer than FF. I know this is dependent on personal preference, but I think it has a nicer look. We need a Flock theme for FF. =)
Flickr integration: For those of us who use Flickr, the Flickr topbar is pretty slick and well done. My only wish is that you could pull up keywords instead of users.
Wikipedia search installed by default: This is also one of my favorites. Alongside Google, Yahoo and the other search engines in the url bar, Wikipedia is right there with them. This is easy to install in FF, but nice that it's included by default.
I think these guys have done a pretty decent job at integrating several widely used web services into the Firefox browser and have made damned good progress at enhancing and making the bookmark system usable again.
What exactly has happened here to cause all this outrage?
Don't blog with your flock so much you'll go blind.
I propose that user agent strings be limited in length to strings of fewer than 2^31 characters.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
sounds like a firefox plug-in. Is it yet? Would it need its own /usr/share/dict/words or the ms equivalent? :)
dictionary or can it use
Could it be a remotely hosted service? Connect to spelling-central.example.com
and run your whole form by the editor there before you post it -- imagine
the surveillence potential if the service was run by the shadow government
Does Firefox have Bundles yet? Like CPAN has Bundles of modules so you can install Bundle::CPAN instead of File::Spec, Digest::MD5, Compress::Zlib, Archive::Tar, Bundle::libnet, Term::ReadKey, and Term::ReadLine::Perl.
Sounds like Flock should be a Firefox Plug-In Bundle - redistributing the browser is just ego flapping.
While they're at it, I'd like a Bundle::Developer for Firefox so I can get everything that was ripped out of Mozilla back. I've tried downloading a recent Firefox and installing everything myself, but there are just too many version incompatibilities between plug-in versions and browser versions to overcome the ease of a Mozilla install.
While I'm ranting, freeze the damn plug-in API until 2.0. Plug-ins have been a source of pain for Mozilla users forever, as just about every release breaks previous plug-ins. Adobe doesn't do this to their users and have a fair share of their markets. Let the plug-in ecosystem get some traction and mature - it's a killer feature of Firefox that's not being exploited because of the breakage and gives the impression from the outside that Firefox "ain't done yet." Real Artists Ship.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You have to post insightful, interesting, or otherwise worthy comments if you want your message moderated up.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It HAS to be a Moleskine. Any small paper notebook under $25 simply won't do. Oh make sure you have an "original" flickr Pro account with nothing but photos your Powerbook with that overdone transparent screen trick.
How about yuppleloggies?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Berners-Lee defined HTTP and HTML, and then proceeded to combine the two into the useful system of the WWW. As such, he did bring them together , even if he did also define them. While you're correct about gopher inspiring such developments, you are incorrect to suggest that he did not bring together HTTP and HTML.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
An author creates the sentences of a book. He or she brings them together into paragraphs. He or she then brings the paragraphs together into chapters, and finally brings together the chapters to produce the final book.
The idea of "bringing together" various concepts does not concern itself with who created such concepts, or whether or not the existed beforehand. All that matters is that the concepts exist, and together they form a greater whole. Be them books or the WWW, they are combinations of smaller parts.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Is it ignorance or intentional marketing hype? Or are you just too cool to capitalize?
I like the word "Blog!" Its only one syllable, yet its original; different!
;D
Bastard! Find another term to pick on!