Review of Flock, the social web browser

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

As you may have noticed by my last few blog entries, I’ve been using Flock to post entries. Flock is a new web browser based off Firefox that incorporates social networking. This includes photos, favorites, blogging and rss feeds. Recently beta 1 of Flock was released and I’ve been using it as my default browser since. I remember using some of the development builds and while they weren’t really ready for everyday use, you got a sense of what they were trying to accomplish and where they wanted to go with it. Flock has been on my radar for a while and now with beta 1, its finally ready for daily use.

Here are some of my initialthoughts after a good week of usage.

First thoughts:

Its pretty obvious Flock is based off Firefox after you first install. Flock does include a new default theme which is the sharpest theme I’ve seen for Firefox yet. There are also a few extra buttons for Photos and Feeds at the top. Install was easy, drag and drop the Flock icon to my Applications folder and off i want.

Extensions:

Lets start with extensions because that is a big problem when moving away from Firefox for me and others. While Flock is based off Firefox, extensions don’t automatically work. They need to be converted to Flock extensions and then there is no guarantee they will work then either. Now for the good news, with Flock I have elimated my need for the:

• del.icio.us extension
• Google Notebook extension
• TabX extension
• Feed Your Reader extension
• Flickr uploader
• Ecto
• NetNewsWire lite

So that takes care of 80% of my extensions I use and most of my common applications i use. Not bad for one web browser.

Now the better news, as of Flock 0.7.1 you can install Firefox extensions directly. While some still don’t work correctly, FasterFox being one of them, most do. So now with the exception of fasterFox, all my common extensions are either installed or replaced by Flock.

Favorites:

This is probably the biggest problem in the development builds which they have nicely straightened out. While your Favorites can be local like they have been traditionally, Flock really shines when you use one of the 2 supported social bookmarking sites, del.ico.us or Shadows. I’ve been using del.icio.us for awhile now so I setup my account in Flock and off i went. With del.icio.us, not sure about Shadows, your bookmarks do not show up under the Favorites menu. What does is collections. Collections are groups of bookmarks and you can toggle in your Bookmark bar. This is awesome. I can switch between groups bookmarks that are easily accessible in an instint without cluttering my interface.

To get to your Favorites, you have 3 options really. First is the Favorites Manager which gives you a view of all your favorites with the url and any tags you may have. While they are just one big flat list, you can sort by name, url, date added and tags to find what your looking for. 2nd you can open up your bookmarks directly from your social bookmarking site. “View Favorites on the web” will bring you directly to your account page. 3rd and my favorite is to use the Search bar at the top. Instead of just searching your default search engine, it searches your bookmarks as well and recent history. So if i look up “XBMC”, it will give me a top 5 in the menu then I can pick “View All” to get a view of anything tagged with “XBMC” or has it in the title. Pure Genius.

Blog:

My blogging client of choice is Ecto. While ecto is a great program, Its one of the few left that are not Universal binary so its a bit sluggish under Rosetta. Because of this I have found myself blogging less because I don’t want to deal with opening etco anymore. This will be fixed with ecto 3.0 but who knows when that will be. Good thing for me, Flock supports posting to blogs using a WYSIWYG interface and has the added feature of pinging web services like Technorati for adding tags to posts. Honestly thats all i really need and Flock provides it all. I have run into a few small hiccups with beta 1 so far like if i replace a post, the post doesn’t show up on the front page even tho its listed as Published and the cursor jumping around like a Mexican jumping bean but I understand its still beta and can only get better.

Photos:

Probably the biggest use of social networking is Photos. Flock supports Flickr and Photobucket accounts for viewing and upload photos. Photobucket is the obviously more popular service, I use Flickr and will go through my experiences with it. When you setup your Flickr account, it imports all your contacts and favorites. If any contact posts a new photo, you get a new photo indicator over the photo button in your toolbar. When you open Photos, you get a film strip like interface showing either your, your contact, everyone or any tag you search for photos. This allows you to view any photo without ever visiting Flickr. You can also tag photos as favorites right from Flock. You have the option of viewing small or large thumbnails while you browse and clicking on any photo will bring you directly to the photo’s page. Flock supports drag and drop so you can drag any photo right into a blog post without having to cut and paste any url or code.

Another feature I see thats rarely talked about is when you are browsing a webpage and there is a photo that is linked from Flickr, you get a little photo icon and hovering over it displays a “View Photostream” that you can click, When clicked, the photo interface will open with that persons photostream so you can view all other photos by that person.

Last but not least is the Photo Uploader. Here you can upload photos directly to your account while cropping them, rotating them, giving them a description, tagging and marking them for public or private use.

Search:

The default search engine for Flock is Yahoo. Nothing really wrong with that but i preferGoogle and it was an easy change to get Google as my default search engine for the Search Bar. Like in Firefox you can add different search engine and choice them. Biggest difference is a web search is done on-the-fly on your Favorites and History. Regardless of your default search engine, it will also show you the top 5 Yahoo returned sites. These can all be customized in the Preferences along with your “Search Elsewhere” places. i find myself using the search bar constantly when looking up bookmarks and tags.

RSS Feeds:

Flock has a built in news reader that is very similar to the way Sage works in Firefox. It doesn’t do a “Live Bookmark” style or a Safari/IE7 RSS view.

Opening up MyNews opens a sidebar with a list of default RSS feeds. I quickly deleted these and Imported my OMPL file without a problem. Folders and all. While you can not chose a style like you can with other RSS readers, the default one is pleasant on the eyes and has a “newspaper” feel to it. You can toggle between New, Saved and Viewed articles; Full, Excerpts and Headlines; and Single and Double Columns.

MyNews is where i find the most bugs so far. This is probably because I watch over 125 feeds so I’m always in it.

• Mark as viewed seems to not be working, i have to use “Mark as read when clicked” to overcome this
• If new Articles go on to a 2nd or 3rd page, they are marked as Viewed automatically and its hard to know what you read and didn’t.
• Video mostly but some photos will overlap the outline in a double column view

Hope they can fix some of these bugs for the next beta.


Web Snipplets:

Web snippets is a clipboard thatsits at the bottom of the browser. This allows you to easily drag and drop images, text, links from sites for later usage in blogs or if you just want to save something without bookmarking it. I find myself using it to bookmark links and photos i want to blog about later. This is very similar to what the Google Notebook extension does except is it not store on a central server. You can click the little notebook icon at any time to open up web snipplets or if you drag some thing over the bottom part of the web browser, it will open automatically for you to drop it in.

Final Thoughts:

Beta 1 is a great start for Flock. Everything works great with virtually no crashes. There are a few bugs here and there and some default behavior thats annoying, but easily fixed but things will only get better. I’ve touched on a lot here but nothing everything Flock has to offer. While Flock isn’t for everyone, its defiently for me and will be my default browser for awhile. I’d like to see a few more services added to the supported one. Zooomr would be nice since i just signed up, tho i really don’t see myself getting away from Flickr just yet. If you know what web2.0 means, chances are you will appropriate ssome of the features Flock has, if not, then Firefox should be more than enough.

Tags: browser, flock, review, social, web