July 10th, 2007 in Technology

Major Upgrade for the Flock Browser

Flock has announced today an upgrade of their browser. Again, there is a focus on blogging as well as photo, video and bookmark management.

Key Flock 0.9 enhancements include the following:

MyWorld: a dynamic home base for all your favorite sites, feeds, and media streams

Flock’s Media MiniBar provides fast access to both photos and videos on Flickr, Photobucket, Youtube, and Truveo.

The new Accounts & Services sidebar offers easier configuration and enhanced discovery and activation logic

Improved Favorites with folders and support for Ma.gnolia and del.icio.us
Blogging: Improved UI, integrated Clipboard, support for all major Blog services including Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad and Livejournal

Security improvements

In-line spell check

Overall Theme upgrade

To those of you who use Flock, I’d like to hear some of your reasons. Although, when I tried it on release, I was impressed with it’s slickness, I was fairly underwhelmed by the features. However, if there is more focus on blog editing, I could be swayed.

Announcing A Major Upgrade - [Flock]

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Craig Childs

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Chris says on July 10th, 2007 at 11:42 am

This browser is a mess. The interface is cluttered with all manner of buttons of different size and shape, and with all sorts of peculiar toolbar shadings. It seems like a classic design-by-committee mess. What was once a nice idea for a social browser has now bloated into an unusable mess. Since it is based on Firefox 1.5, it is also very sluggish. 2 thumbs down.
Evan Hamilton says on July 10th, 2007 at 12:55 pm

Hey Chris,

Flock 0.9 is built off of the Firefox 2.0 framework. Also, any extensions you have installed can affect Flock’s (and Firefox’s) performance. Performance is one of the primary issues we’re focusing on for 1.0 and we are dedicating significant resources to improving Flock’s performance.

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com
Wolfger says on July 10th, 2007 at 1:36 pm

I used Flock for a short while, but I just didn’t care for some aspects of the UI, and I disliked having to jump through hoops to (maybe) get a Firefox extension to work. It was, however, a very cool idea, and I think I’ll give 0.9 a try when/if it hits the Mepis/Dapper repositories. (or Gentoo’s portage, on my secondary system)
Frédéric de Villamil says on July 10th, 2007 at 3:13 pm

I’ve been a flock user and supporter since the very first release, long ago, and even thoug some freezing issues in some old versions, I won’t stop using it to go back to firefox just because its search engine : google, favourites and cache.

I’m also using some “social” features, mostly flickr, but I think I can have it back on FF. Not the search engine.
Chris says on July 11th, 2007 at 9:10 am

Evan,

My bad on the FF 1.5 assumption. My main gripes are with the interface, however — you have tried to force too much stuff into it. It reminds me of FF with a couple dozen extensions installed — it becomes unwieldy. Compare Flock to Safari or Camino, and the difference is striking. Its not bad to have lots of functionality (e.g. Omniweb), but it doesnt all have to be crammed into the UI.
Evan Hamilton says on July 11th, 2007 at 6:02 pm

Hey Chris,

Thanks for the details. We put more in the chrome to assist in discoverability of our features, but there has definitely been feedback that it is too busy. We just hired a new lead designer a few weeks ago and he has a lot of ideas on how we can, as you said, have lots of functionality (and discoverability) without having it all crammed into the UI. If you have any specific suggestions, feel free to shoot them to my address below and I will pass them on to him.

Flock on!

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com