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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!)"
With a whole lot of crap I don't need or care about..
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
Installing flash for firefox is fairly painless. I'd be more impressed the ability to easily turn on/off flash or kill flash reliably. Like Prefbar or some of the other mozilla/firefox extensions.
Wow, they managed to port flash to AMD64 before Adobe/Macromedia did. This truly is amazing.
It looks to me like they just give you the 32-bit Firefox with 32-bit Flash. That has always worked on 64-bit machines.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
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?
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'.
The thing is, though, Firefox isn't truly a minimalist browser – even though it looks fairly simple, and it's definitely lightweight compared to the Mozilla suite, it's nonetheless a pretty powerful program with a lot of configuration options, dialogs, features, etc., and not to mention an extremely complex rendering engine. I don't think a "minimalist" Web browser would use heavy-duty cross-platform GUI abstraction layers or take over an hour to build on a fast new Pentium4/Athlon system, either.
Now, if you want a truly minimalist graphical browser, may I suggest Dillo; while it isn't stated outright as one of the design goals, Dillo is definitely a very simple, compact program which does what it needs to, and does it well – but doesn't implement additional bloat. I suggest checking for one of the patched versions, because they add in nice features like tabs and anti-aliasing, but whichever Dillo version you choose, it's guaranteed a tiny little program for the real minimalist!
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
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.
Watch it, you're expressing a rational, informed opinion! This is Slashdot, we can't have that!
I don't think you're getting the point. They don't need the firefox minimalist philosphy, that's what *firefox* is for. Flock is for the "I want tons of whiz-bang features" crowd. If a person (such as yourself and I) want a minimalist browser, they don't use flock, they use firefox. They are targeting two completely different types of users.
Wouldn't a Web 2.0 Browser be a web browser implemented inside another browser using Javascript, XML, and Flash?
Reed
Features that less than 1% of 1% of their users will ever even look at...
Actually, Flock is aimed at that 1%. And they're betting on that 1% growing.
Most of their target audience will be interested in the built-in feed reader, the drag-n-drop blogging, etc. Whether that's enough people to sustain a company (and whether Flock can collect enough revenue from partnership deals) remains to be seen. Certainly Opera's comparatively small marketshare, usually cited as less than 1% worldwide, has been plenty to sustain them for years,* so it's at least possible.
*Admittedly Opera's got more revenue streams than just partnerships, since they've got cell phone makers licensing their mobile browser, and they'll be selling the Nintendo DS and Wii versions, etc.
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.
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??