Seeing if Flock has wings

I can only read about so many people trying out a new browser before I have to give it a whirl myself. So, today I’ve spent the day using Flock as my browser instead of Firefox.

First impressions? I like it. It grabbed all of my Firefox settings, bookmarks, cookies, and such so I really didn’t notice too much of a difference when it came to just surfing. I guess that shouldn’t come as a surprise since it’s basically a modified version of Firefox (go Open Source go!). While it does seem a tad slower, it is still a beta. Could be they have some issues to work out with displaying pages.

Flock does provide you with a whole new integrated experience though. For example, when I star a page (you click a star to add a bookmark), I have it set so it adds the bookmark straight to my del.icio.us account. If you choose to ‘unstar’ the page, it removes it from your del.icio.us account. Couldn’t be easier. It did take me a couple of minutes to figure out how to make it default to opening up the window so I could tag my bookmarks. Otherwise things would get messy quick. So the built in integration is nice.

Flickr is also fully integrated. What do I mean by fully integrated. FULLY.

I just saved this screenshot as a file. Then I dragged the jpg from my desktop to this window and dropped it. When I did, it opened up an ‘upload to Flickr’ window and allowed me to add my tags and set options. I clicked upload and it took the fie, uploaded it to Flickr, got the code to display the photo and inserted it in. That’s how integrated. Oh yeah, and as you can see from the screenshot, you can view your Flickr feed from within the browser, scroll through your contact’s feeds, drag and drop from the browse window onto your computer, and so on. You gotta play with it to believe it. It’s slick.

Then we get to blogging. In case you couldn’t figure it out from the paragraph above, this post was created from within Flock. It supports most major blog engines and handles most of your average functions. Heck, it even has a spell check built in, something I don’t have installed in Wordpress right now! I really like the fact that I can resize the screenshot I put up above just by clicking and dragging from the corners. Very easy. Oh yeah, as I just discovered, your categories and a tagging engine is built in as well for your blog entries.

I haven’t even touched the aggregator piece of it, and I”ve barely started exploring the search features and ‘web snippets’ piece, but so far I’m incredibly impressed. This one is definitely worth the download and may be my new browser of choice.

If you give it a try, let me know your thoughts. I’m curious to find the downside to this slick new browser, if there is one!

technorati tags:Flock, browser

Blogged with Flock

7 Comments

Stephen Rahn
6/16/2006

I used Flock back in October for a short time, and I remember liking it. I don’t really remember why I stopped using it, but I’m going to download the new version.

Stephen Rahn
6/16/2006

Now I remember one thing. You can’t have multiple home pages. In Firefox I have 9 different home pages that load when I launch it.

Brian Mull
6/16/2006

Two things.

1) I would like to see the news reader sync w/ Bloglines.

2) I would like the option of being able to save a favorite to del.icio.us, or just as a bookmark on my own computer, or both.

Gerald
6/16/2006

Bloglines is being investigated for a later release it is.
You can do number two already.

Traci
6/17/2006

I’m intrigued by your review of Flock. But have you used the Performancing add-on in Firefox for blogging? I just discovered it and have been pretty impressed.

Steve Dembo
6/18/2006

I have, and it worked pretty well, but I did have some problems getting it going at first. It just kept timing out for some reason. Even when it did work, something about it didn’t quite feel natural to me. Maybe it was splitting the browser into two horizontal panes…

With Flock, your block posts come up in a pop up window, essentially the same way the Wordpress or Typepad Bookmarklet work. However, I’ve also had problems with Wordpress’s bookmarklet quick post, mostly with the way it lays out in Firefox. Gets scrunched for some reason. So for now I’m going to keep using Flock’s interface and see how it I like it over time.

In the release notes on the blog, the Flock folks do say that if you like Firefox and have installed 10-15 plugins so that it’s set up exactly the way you like it, then you might not be into Flock. On the other hand, if you want to just have all those features in one big package, then it might be worth looking into.

Ed Warkentin
7/30/2006

I love the new features, but I am having trouble changing from the browser I am used to (Safari). I’m a keyboard-shortcut guy, and some of those basic commands are drastically different.
The new features Steve mentions are exciting and a real draw, but I like to be able to:
1) Hit the space bar to go down one page.
2) Hit Shift-space bar to go up one page.
3) Hit Shift-Apple-left/right arrow to go to the adjacent tab.

Until I either discover how Flock does this (without using only the scroll bar arrows), or they build in the feature, I’m going to have to be doing a lot more pointing and clicking than I’m used to.

I tried blogging with the integrated Flock features, but when I wanted to make hyperlinks, I had to manually use HTML, and when I use the non-browser-specific method, I was able to use the WSYWIG buttons to assist in making this part of blogging much quicker. Even if you’re an accomplished HTML-er, it just takes time!
About those buttons, though, Safari doesn’t have them (which makes that feature somewhat browser-specific, I suppose), which is a bummer. Maybe that will cause me to use it more and push me “over the top”.

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