p2p news / p2pnet: Flock, you may recall, is a new browser built on Firefox. And one of the features that makes it stand out is the fact social networking is built directly into the browsing experience.

Cool. But what is Flock? Or, equally to the point, what isn’t it?

For one thing, it isn’t a browser just anyone can pick up and use, blogs Paul Stamatiou, going on:

“Unlike Firefox, there is a slightly sharper learning curve. The way regular bookmarks are managed has changed, making it remarkably different from IE and Firefox, but seemingly closer to the way Safari handles bookmarks. Oh and I should mention, they are now called favorites not bookmarks. Apparently the bookmark has lost its cool factor now. Flock is not yet compatible with every extension and theme made for Firefox, therefore much of the functionality that Firefox users gain from extensions will be lost in Flock.

“I would not suggest using Flock as your primary browser just yet. Not only is it still in the early stages of development, it is based upon the beta code for Firefox 1.5, which hasn’t exactly been proven to be the kindest to me. Flock has flocked up a few times, lost my data, and forgotten my settings. That being said, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Stamatiou, who confesses that the above notwithstanding, he was “blown away,” does a great breakdown of Flock’s ins and outs and on the aspect which has caught a lot of eyes, “support for the wildly popular social bookmarking service, del.icio.us, has been included. There’s not much to say about this great new feature. It just works. Give Flock your login info, and if you give it the authorization to, your favorites will be added to your del.icio.us account.”

He ends up with:

“While I have brought up several cases where I was disappointed with some of functionality from the new features, that does not change the fact that I love Flock. My only problem is trying to explain what Flock is to a Firefox user in one sentence… my usual response is its better or just download it. But now I have come to see its much more than that. It is a powerful web browsing and now publishing utility. And having it open source seals the deal, ensuring many Flock compatible extensions in the near future. When Flock hits a more stable release, I would love to see the ability to open a favorite in the favorite bar in a new tab. Usually, I middle-click them to open them in new tabs, but in Flock they are unresponsive and you can’t even right click them to change the properties, forcing you to open up the Favorites Manager to get the job done.”

Stay tuned.

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See:-
browsing experience - Flock: new browser on Firefox, August 29, 2005
blogs - Flock, Under Those Feathers, October 21, 2005

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2005 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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