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Flock, the Web 2.0 Browser?
escay writes "Cardinal, the Beta 1 version of Firefox-based browser Flock, was released Tuesday with many polished features. Some of the features include drag-and-drop photo uploading for Flickr and Photobucket, an in-built RSS aggregator, direct blogging tool, and shared favorites/bookmarks. In step with Web 2.0 philosophy, Flock provides a rich user-centric experience, making it easier to bring information to the user and vice versa. It is available for Linux/Mac/Windows, and you can download it here. (And for those of you trying to get Flash working in Firefox on an AMD64 Linux machine, try this and be pleasantly surprised!)"
Slashvertisement much?
drag-and-drop photo uploading for Flickr and Photobucket, an in-built RSS aggregator, direct blogging tool, and shared favorites/bookmarks
And Taco wanted more hype? I don't get it.
So far it looks pretty snazzy but will it be nearly as good as IE 7? Its a joke people a bad one I know.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
With a whole lot of crap I don't need or care about..
Dropping into a seizure because of all the blinky lights and animated characters is more like it.
$7.95/mo, 200 GB disk, 2TBxfer, MySQL, PHP, RoR.
...just to be clear, will this still be backwards compatible with the old version of the web?
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
Wow, they managed to port flash to AMD64 before Adobe/Macromedia did. This truly is amazing.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Does it support all of Firefox's extensions?
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
tht wud b so kewl lol
This has come along way, and it's pretty slick how everyting is integrated into one "2.0" webbrowser. While just about everything here can be done via FF and a ton of extentions, this is the 'out of the box' solution for the non-geek crowd (read HUGE crowd) to get into blogging and other 'social' things on the web, or just do it much, much easier.
For the target market I think this is just an excellent example of what can be done with Open Source, they basically found/created their own nitch, and filled it. Seems like a good company thus far, but now comes the hard part... 4) Profit???
File alongside: Songbird (with almost all the same comments from above)
fak3r.com
Flock was (and is) mostly hype and silly buzzwords. The only good thing that came put of this was the Flock Sucks blog that lambasted Flock and the hype surrounding it. Too bad it's gone now, because it was really funny.
Anyone looking for blog features in Firefox should take a look at the Performancing extension instead.
http://performancing.com/firefox
Sounds just as productive as Netscape 4.0, probably works just as well too. Such a great piece of software that was... print preview gave a divide by zero error.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
A whole lotta bloat. Sad to see they've thrown the Firefox minimalist philosophy out the window. Features that less than 1% of 1% of their users will ever even look at have no place in a product. "in-built RSS aggregator, direct blogging tool" Give me a break.
hmmm, while this may look good at first glance I see this as a step away from the standards. We have browsers (ff,ie,safari and so on) that behave in the same way and are not bound to different websites(I know some only run on ie be most). This may introduce targeted or branded browsers just like aol that only works with different sites. Not so good in my opinion....
Looks to me like a web browser, with extentions for all the things people who think the world cares what they say and have an ego so big it needs a 2.0 need in a browser - blogs and photos.
But seriously, anything that keeps teens out of the real world where they would be destroying things or taking jobs away from hard working illegal aliens, I'm 100% behind!
Go Flock yourself!
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Some of the features include drag-and-drop photo uploading for Flickr and Photobucket, an in-built RSS aggregator, direct blogging tool, and shared favorites/bookmarks.
Emo kids, unite!
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
Since when does making it easier for people to post volumes of useless crap all over the net a good thing? YAY now with myspace integration! Blog more useless crap about your vapid life even faster! Upload pics of your ugly self with less hassle!
Am I alone, or does this whole Net 2.0 thing make others cringe too?
The problem with AMD64 Linux, Firefox, and Flash, was that Firefox was compiled in 64-bit. The only available Flash plugin is only built in 32-bit mode, so the browser can not use it. You could then just use a 32-bit Firefox version to be able to use the Flash plugin. That's what I do on my 64-bit Linux system. So this "feature" offers nothing more than was already available.
Flash for Linux can be downloaded at http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.
It seems that it has some really sweet features for locking files. Though I have to admit I don't see quite how to use it to browse the web.
flock (util-linux 2.13-pre7)
Usage: flock [-sxun][-w #] fd#
flock [-sxon][-w #] file [-c] command...
-s --shared Get a shared lock
-x --exclusive Get an exclusive lock
-u --unlock Remove a lock
-n --nonblock Fail rather than wait
-w --timeout Wait for a limited amount of time
-o --close Close file descriptor before running command
-c --command Run a single command string through the shell
-h --help Display this text
-V --version Display version
I ran, I ran so far away.
It looks really nice but is there anything that it can do that firefox can't without the right extensions? Personally I think it will end up being a really cool experiment that, in the end, will just go back into firefox where it started. Any killer-app type features will probably go back to firefox natively (and probably other browsers too). Site specific features will probably become extensions.
-- my $ 0.02
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
Yeah, M$ got kicked once again! They lost another six customers!
...BS 2.0 and BS 1.0 is that the former smells twice as bad.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
It's Web 1.0 with mandatory Flash support and new fonts, apparently.
People keep spouting off about all this innovation that makes up Web 2.0, but it looks like the same old stuff to me with the exception that the companies haven't run out of venture capital yet. That and what we used to call an AOL user, we now call a 'blogger'.
I use my browsers to browse the web... and the faster and more efficient I browse the web, the better.
If this browser can do that for me, we have a winner. If it can't, it has already defeated itself.
and then i used it. I am really not a "Web 2.0" person. I have photobucket and flickr accounts, have a de.licio.us acct i never use. I do have an abandonned blogger site and i have a site on wordpress. So i use the stuff, i'm just not a fanatic and not a fan of buzzwords.
I will say this though, i used it in alpha. I used it in linux (Ubuntu 6.06, Fedora Core 5) and i used it on XP. And after applying all the same tweaks in about:config that i do to Firefox, it ran faster than Firefox. I got a good many of my favorite extensions to work (though not all, and hence why i'm back to FF as it is now).
The only thing i did learn to love though, is that not a single firefox skin actually feels natural at all. Flock is slick as hell and without being an eyesore. The blog publishing was very useful, i didn't like the bookmarking at all, but the photouploading was nice too. And frankly, no extensions really pulled off what flock has, at the quality that flock has.
So i really don't get the complaints, i found it useful, i found it faster than firefox. I just value all my FF extensions more than speed, otherwise i'd be using Opera. But what Flock did, it did very well and i intend to check out the beta.
maybe, that question should be in "Ask Slashdot" section? :)
Until then -- pshh, whatever.
Are fads that are going to disappear inside of 12 months?
+1 Jeff Pulver
Good for you, that you have no need of it. And does your personal lack of need make this not a useful browser to everyone else?
Judging by the general tone of this discussion, yes.
There are an awful lot of people on the web, and on Slashdot, who don't seem to make a distinction between "X is aimed at a different target audience" and "X is pointless." (There's also a large segment of the population for which demonstrating disdain for something is a way of demonstrating superiority, but that's another issue.)
Maybe someone needs to write a "people have different needs and tastes" tutorial. It would have to be in the form of a HOWTO or maybe a man page.
I almost got a Bingo on that blurb. FFS, /. is supposedly for /nerds/, not suits and marketdroids.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
what annoys me most is its default affiliation with yahoo search. there isn't even an easy select option to make google news or google search your default. rather, you have to go through 4 - 5 clicks to change it. certain functionality, such as results as you type, aren't even available for google.
neat browser. i'm happier with firefox extensions.
"Another wholesome product from a good company. Oh yeah, and it's free. Hey Microsoft, take IE and shove it :D"
I use firefox myself. But, IE is free also. And Firefox is funded by AOL. So take your pick.
I think people use 'Ubuntu' in their posts to sound cool.
What makes firefox work is that it's flexible. You chose to add a plugin or not. What does Flock provide? It forces you to accept its chosen plugins. That's bogus. I don't want any browser to chose my photo sharing community or be forced into using their web2.0 partners. Unlike firefox, the idea behind making this browser was funded from day 1 by a VC. You can bet Flock will sacrafice usability over turning a profit on their investment. I'm not a firefix expert but you can probably download firefox versions that come pre bundled with enough web2.0 extensions that it rivals Flock.
Read the flock blog entry about their business model. priceless. I wish they could film this company like they did in the movie startup.com...
At least that's what the article summary says. Wait, on second thought no meaning is lost by removing the Web 2.0 phrase from that sentence, but I guess "Flock is working on enhancing the Firefox UI" is less exciting.
Mashups! Sorry, I appear to have Tourette's Syndrome 2.0.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Despite Flickr's new policy on screenshots you can find screenshots of flock fairly easily. http://flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe/sets/1082355/
>Flock provides a rich user-centric experience
Jeez, give us a break. Leave that marketing speak at the door.
Wouldn't a Web 2.0 Browser be a web browser implemented inside another browser using Javascript, XML, and Flash?
Reed
"Flock the web 2.0 browser"... okay. I misread that and though Slashdot articles had gotten rather blunt all of a sudden.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Damn, this story got my hopes up. I thought someone had modded FF so it's rendering engine would pass the ACID 2 test. It is a shame its just some hyped up browser.
He meant, "Outside of work, where I do nothing but post to /. all day long, I have a life other than the Internet, you know, what with all the BiMonSciFiCons and the SCA and Ren Faire and Dungeon Mastering and the 'networking' (read as: desperately trying to find a girlfriend IRL after all those "Crying Game" disasters of Internet dating...)"
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
For a windows only release, there sure are a lot of mac based screenshots on the Tour.
true most of flock is hype and garbage but when you actually use it (i know this is /. so for most of you who haven;t even bothered to rtfa this will be out of the question) some of the features are actually darn good- the inbuilt rss reader rocks (seems better than any 3rd party reader i've tried and outclasses sage by miles) and the storgae area and del.icio.us integration is very tight. the searchbar while set to yahoo by defalut can be easily fixed with yubnub to make something much miore useful than the same bar in FF and the fact its all intergrated menas it has a lower memory footprint than FF (flock currently at 100meg whears FF is usually at about 200 on my system with 50+ extensions). beta 0.7 is also a lot more stable than previous releases.
"...just to be clear, will this still be backwards compatible with the old version of the web?
:)
! Nope, but don't worry, they'll fix it with Web 3.0!
Kaetemi
I'm gonna be a flockstar! Yippee!
If it aggregated all my subscribed RSS feeds on a single page, with full text, I'd probably switch, as those photo and blogging tools look great.
It nearly does, but falls short. I can view full-text articles when viewing a single feed, but there's no way to view whole articles when looking at the complete list of subscribed feeds.
Why have only Safari's developers figured this one out?
I remember the last time Flock showed up on Slashdot, they only had a sign-up form for the alpha program and even that collapsed in a pile of molten silicon. The story has been up for an hour, and Flock's website is still responsive.
I, for one, welcome our new DotCom Bust 2.0 overlords! At least we can see this one coming.
I'm really digging this web browser. Since I'm leading a x86_64 Linux distro project it is very appealing to me. I just may replace the good old Firefox with Flock.
:-)
I'm sure glad I ran across this.
Thanks Slashdot!
-Axxium
While most of the features in flock aren't really useful (and the theme hurts my eyes), I kind of like the way their news reader works. Does anyone know of a FF extension that works in a similar manner (with a button that changes itself when there are new items)?
My new blog
Say what you will, but I went to their site-- and they promised to make me a flockstar! All I've gotta do is use flock to do something cool, like post an entry to my blog ("dear blog, today I got up. Then I ate some cereal. Then I did ollies in front of the drug store with my friends.") or put pictures on flickr ("Tags: ollies, kickass, breakfast, bitchin'.")
Screw you guys. I'm gonna be a famous flockstar, and they're gonna put me on their blog. It's gonna be way rad. I bet they give me an honorary motorcycle or something.
Flockstar! Whoo.
These guys are gonna usher in a whole new era of serious, relevant, internet content!
Or a flockee?
Yeah, I agree. It personally offends me and makes me very upset when other people use anything Microsoft produces- we should specifically limit user choice and force them to jump through hoops if they want to use it.
(sarcastic, if you can't tell... I hear the internet is bad for that sort of thing)
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
I think people are complaining about when flash is used specifically to annoy: ads. I saw the Internet without Adblock the other day, and it was mightily irritating. I was forced to run from the room and scrub my eyeballs with Fast Orange. Flash is cool, but looking at every Flash ad on the Internet is not.
Hardly.
Give me a browser optimized for technologies like AJAX, ASP, and javascript and *then* talk to me about a browser built for Web 2.0
This is just firefox with a bunch of pre-installed (unremoveavle) extensions.
It's a joke. And you can bet some jackass is laughing it off all the way to the bank.
"Adblock is only compatible with Flock version 1.0+"
Flock is hard to pronounce? What the hell are you talking about?
looks and feels like a love child of IE7 and FF1.5. not bad for a beta... I'll use it more at work and see how it handles what I do
The fact that the flash plugin is proprietary, and the format is semi open in that, you can use the spec to write programs which *make* flash files, but you can't write a player. The end result, is that only platforms officially blessed by macromedia can watch flash files, this excludes 64bit platforms right now and is the most often cited reason for people not using a pure 64bit linux system.
Also, the most common use of flash is for noisy flashing adverts, which are highly irritating and distract from the site your trying to read.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I don't have a photobucket or flickr or del.ic.ious (or whatever) account either...but it makes me wonder how 'honest' these services are if they're being integrated into an OSS web browser... I've seen plenty of photobucket.com posted pics, what are the privacy concerns for these services? Should I trust them, or should I continue to use Firefox and my own web server, manually uploading stuff?
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
And Firefox is funded by AOL. So take your pick.
Disinformation. This is 2006, not 2003.
http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/
what happened to the good old days of lynx anyway. sometimes all i wanted to do was browsing, i felt even Opera was kind of overkill with all the graphics on top and the bottom. some how i like those browsers such as firefox and IE, which just lets me browse
That and what we used to call an AOL user, we now call a 'blogger'
I wish I had mod points today.
The free versions of IE (Mac, Solaris, HPUX) are no more... Now you can only get the version that's included in the price of windows.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Fails miserably...
IE isn't free ... ... you have to get a copy of Windows in order to use it.
I think I'll stick with Firefox (or maybe this browser) on my linux system.
krenshala
I had tried to find the best way to describe my little experience with it. Mod parent up, he summed it up nicely.
whoever gives them more money, gets the default search option. I guess M$ decided not to participate at all.
From TFA:
If you are a power user (hint: if you use del.icio.us or a news reader or if you visit Digg, that probably means you) and if you have decorated your browser with, oh, say, 20 extensions or more, Flock may not be for you. We like these services as much as you do, and we share the basic values of transparency and control that are an essential component of the participatory web. We are trying to bring these services to mere mortals.
It's all good, but why not just create a Firefox distribution package with the best of Firefox + Extensions, and just write extensions for the things that aren't yet available from others?
I know this sounds too simplistic. That's why I like the Colbert Report. It doesn't matter if I'm right (because I'm sure the experts will show me many ways in which my take isn't feasible, isn't the way development "actually" happens, etc.); but my way seems like it would be easier.
M$ should pay them to include the search engine. That would help everybody.
To be honest I don't know why M$ would want their search engine listed in a communist web browser anyway.
evil is as evil does
Don't you mean, 'what the flock are you talking about'?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Can we please change this new \. theme so it doesn't make the default font size so darn small?!?!
Constitutionally Correct
1. It seems to be impossible to change the default search engine. I changed it from Yahoo to Google, but the change did not "stick". I've no idea why. But, maybe this is a moot point, since I can't see OSX users switching to Flock.
2. Like FireFox, Flock does not understand OSX key bindings (e.g. I just typed control-A to go to the start of this paragraph to insert a "p" tag), so there seems to be little point in bothering with it.
There are several browsers that follow the OSX interface guidelines, so Flock would have to offer something pretty useful to make me switch.
I'm getting quite sick of all people here bashing this browser and the whole web 2.0 thing.
Did you even TRIED the damn thing??
I probably will be modded down, but anyway, I just want to say this.
I really don't understand why a lot of the Slashdotters are reacting very VERY negative about anything that has to do with Web 2.0. I too hate the way marketing people are using this term, but we are definately experiencing a transition from the single sites based web to a web environment that is based on social interaction and sharing. Internet is just not the same as it was a couple of years ago. Or am I talking bullshit here?? Doesn't everything starts to become connected to everything?
Why does it irritate you when people start to see that big changes and name it Web 2.0? People are really over reacting here. Why??
Flock the Web Two-Oh browser surfed by the sea
And frolicked on a bloggers's list in a land called HTTP
OK, I won't give up my day job.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Although it has one of the most impressive news readers I've seen, the basic browser is a little buggy. I had some problems with browsing some pages, so I wonder about how closely firefox based it is.
Auto upload to Flickr? Auto blogging? RSS feeds?
Call me a Luddite, but this sounds like a must-have for every 13 year old girl out there, and needless bloat, security holes, and crap for the rest of us. How about a lightweight, fast browser? AND THATS IT!?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Will this make my hair look strange? Will clouds of fog evelop me and will ambigously looking people be ridding hourses to new wave vibes? I'll have to admit, I'm a bit frightened by the whole concept. I think I saw a hichcock movie about this whole thing.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
That was really nifty what they where trying to do.
Make a lightweight browser with no frills.
Whatever happened to that browser ? (sarcasm)
I thought that they spent all these years trying to take the netscape out of mozilla....
What license is this released under - I dont see to find any information anywhere...
Join the herd, kids.
This looks familiar.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Modded flamebait ??
Guess you dont remember phoenix browser.
A 32-bit browser will fail on a web page with a couple dozen 4000x4000 images.
It would also fail at opening individual 4000x4000 images in a couple dozen tabs.
It would fail with a single 30000x30000 image.
Any regular web site will crash your browser if you open enough tabs.
yes
Is it just me or is does this just look like myspace made into its own browser?
I've always pictured the color of OS zealotry as a sort of bright flamingo pinkish hue
> And for those of you trying to get Flash working in Firefox on an AMD64 Linux machine, try this and be
> pleasantly surprised!
Ads!
Billions and billions of ads
Unlike everything else gecko ever released, this little Flock-er runs like mad on OS X. Smoooth, on both G4 machines - and fast. I have long believed that Firefox is a wonder only if you have been chained to WIndows / IE. Oh, I know, I know, you will beg to differ, but that's because you do not run a tight Tiger ship.
Flock-y. Come to mama, I already heart you.
oh, a DOS user! I think you'll have to get bigger monitor to increase font size in backslashdot.
This is not the browser I want to see.
I don't like browsers that automagically do weird things for me. I don't usually like Flash. I don't trust Javascript (and thank goodness my browsers can't execute ActiveX controls!). I don't like to trust most code or "rich media experiences" to execute on my computer. I don't want my browser automatically downloading stuff from links I haven't clicked, and so on...
There are a few tradeoffs. Although I usually browse with Javascript disabled, I selectively enable it for a very few sites. On rare occasions I do allow Flash to do something (although I keep local shared objects disabled as much as Flash makes that possible), but that's not often. I DO browse with images enabled, although I'm always apprehensive of exploitable image parser flaws that surely exist on most platforms.
The last thing I want is another browser that joyously does every silly client-side thing anyone can think of. I want a lightweight, well constructed, safe, browser that doesn't by default execute javascript from domains that I didn't navigate to, doesn't by default allow sites other sites than the one I'm browsing to set cookies, doesn't by default execute Flash from anywhere, doesn't prefetch pages I haven't navigated to, doesn't by default "search from the address bar," doesn't automatically execute anything unless I explicitly allow it (anyone else scared stiff of Safari's automatically "open 'safe' files after downloading"!?) or specify conditions when it's OK to do so, and so on... A thoughtfully designed interface would be icing on the cake.
Surely there must be other folks out there with similar desires, so why isn't there a modern browser that embodies this mentality out-of-the-box? Firefox doesn't do it -- you need to spend plenty of time in the preferences, about:config page, have some extensions installed, and it's still far from perfect. Philosophically speaking, Firefox seems to have been designed to make newbies comfy in their new browser by acting like IE even where IE sucks, rather than being a browser for paranoid geeks or purists. On top of that the Firefox interface is kludgy and frustrating in many places.
So where is the default paranoid browser that packages powerful controls on client-side behavior in a readily accessible user interface?
OK, I know, indeed it is O. S. :-)
But it's an OS tool dedicated specifically to plug you to private info gathering companies -the (uncorrelated) fact it doesn't support Adblock now is even more funny
Personally, I'm waiting O. S. versions of those 'my-preferred-space-that-gathers-all-my-photos, emails, agenda and best RSS news before trying.
THIS, would be an interesting direction for O. S., much, much better than Flock. In my opinion.
Herve S.
Just to mention that there's another way to get flash working on AMD64 (or PPC, or SPARC, or whatever else) :
using an opensource plug-in (and recompiling it for your platfrom).
GNASH uses openGL and Cairo for rendering, and it looks like it has recently started making alpha releases (0.7.1).
Right now, it doesn't support streaming and thus doesn't work with google video and youtube, but works already with most animations...
A wish to say a big thank you to the team working behind this.
In a couple of months, maybe we'll enjoy something that's compatible enough and will be considered as a viable alternative to flashplayer.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
A few thoughts on Flock itself.
What I would really like to see happening here is these guys working with FireFox to make one really good browser. It seems to me they are riding Web 2.0 hype and looking for a bit of early traction and then probably an acquisition by Yahoo! as the Yahoo! browser.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I like how "crap" is a tag for this.
The term "Web 2.0" is a retarded as "blog", and Flock seems to follow the line of things having a purpose of only being hip and cool, while being just a cheap copy of something else. (Remember NeoPlanet?) Firefox with a new theme and pre-packaged extensions. I don't use Flickr, I don't write a "blog"... (I do write a journal!) I see no use for that browser!
Rémi
I've been using flock for the last 2 months or so. I used to have a ff install loaded up with extensions I never used, but I've found flock to work fine for most of what I do.
I don't miss FF at all, I uninstalled it a few weeks ago. Flock is definitely worth checking out, especially if you use del.icio.us or (to a lesser degree IMHO) Flickr. (Flock uses delicious for its bookmark system, it doesn't have browser-held bookmarks...very nice for mutiple machines (home/work, etc.)
The next time some idiot mentions 'Web 2.0', turn to them and say 'Yeah, Web 2.0 was great, and we've already started working with some of those great Web 3.0 features like flogging [blogging with Flash] and muse [interactive groups of people who share musical tastes, partnered with new music releases]'
You can insert any stupid name or item, such as instead of 'Web 3.0', you can call it 'WebNext', 'Imagiweb', 'ZeroWeb', 'WebMX' whatever. And instead of flogging and muse, make up any two equally boring and already available technologies.
I think if enough people started doing this, we would either accidentally create the next big thing for talentless marketers or at least get people to shut up about Web 2.0...
You have enlightened me beyond normal means.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.