Flocking Fantastic
Flock is, and I’ve said it before, a fantastic browser. Not everyone agrees, saying it’s just Firefox with a bunch of extensions added on top.
This isn’t the impression I’ve gotten–I’d like to see an extension do some of the stuff I really like from Flock.
Let’s start by looking at the feedreader. Everyone one using Firefox knows about the “Live Bookmarks”, as they’re called in Firefox–most people, anyway, and sure: it works quite well, assuming you only want the headlines to display in your browser.
Flock, on the other hand, has a really nifty built-in feed reader, which automatically loads any RSS feed opened and asks you if you wish to subscribe to it.
Furthermore, it allows you to read all your news, choose between displaying headlines, excerpts and full articles and save any post you might find interesting for later use.
Sure, this particular feature probably could be achieved with a simple extension–I wouldn’t know as I’ve never attempted to code any kind of extension or theme for Flock or Firefox.
Another really cool feature is browsing Photobucket or flickr galleries–in a seperate pane! It even notifies you of any new photos uploaded by your contacts. If that’s not kickass, I don’t know what is.
When you mouse over an image on flickr or Photobucket servers, a small banner flashes over the image, that lets you click it and load the person’s photostream in the pane.
Those, along with the new theme, are the most notable two new features.
I want to grab hold of one more though, the del.icio.us integration. There was a Firefox extension for it, but let’s face it–hardcoded features are much, much nicer than extensions, right?
You double-click the star (which denotes a favourite) left of your addressbar and type in regular favourite-options and it simply posts it to your del.icio.us–which it asks you for on startup (which is the case with flickr, Shadows, Photobucket and such services aswell).
Of course, there are tons of more features like these–like dragging snippets into your browser window and drop them in a pane at the bottom and various other things–it’s not like they’re not worth mentioning, because they are–though I don’t want to bore you anymore. Instead, point your browsers to the Flock website and click the fancy download-link.
Lasse Havelund on August 18th, 2006
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Glen C. responded on August 19th, 2006 at 3:51 am | permalink
I just see absolutely no reason to use this over firefox.
jakedahn responded on August 19th, 2006 at 3:57 am | permalink
Glen, you see absolutely no reason to not use windows. I think you’re blind dude.
I worked some QA on flock, and IMO it beats firefox if your looking for a good way to use flickr, and del.icio.us. Otherwise, they are quite similar.
I would say that just the flickr topbar, makes flock more useable than firefox. It’s just not apparant to people who haven’t used it, at all or who don’t use the “social web” meaning things like flickr/del.icio.us, and that sort of thing.
Silly Pat responded on August 19th, 2006 at 4:08 am | permalink
I’m not using flickr and del.icio.us, so I’ll stick to FF. That said…
I love my portable FF. *Huggles it*
Glen C. responded on August 19th, 2006 at 4:30 am | permalink
jakedahn, I see plenty of reasons not to use Windows, but I see many more reasons not to use Mac or Linux, which is off topic.
And I use flickr and del.icio.us rather extensively and see no reason to download a whole other browser just to do that.
Lasse Havelund responded on August 19th, 2006 at 4:39 pm | permalink
Sure, that’s a way of looking at it. The point to me, however, is that Flock makes all these things easier and more accesible.
Thilak responded on August 20th, 2006 at 2:08 am | permalink
I would agree with Glench.
Thilak responded on August 20th, 2006 at 6:21 am | permalink
After reading this post, I downloaded flock. Its as good as Firefox. All my favorite FF Extensions are available for flock too(If not, I can convert a FF ext to Flock ext)
harrisony responded on August 29th, 2006 at 12:02 am | permalink
Yes i must agree flock is pretty l33t and in a way its a web2.0 mascot (with flickr,del.icio.us,etc.)
But in the useragent it has the default ff 1.5.0.5 plus flock 0.7.8 (or what ever it is)
And also tip you dont need any flock’d or ff to flock convertors. Just install in flock and when the warning comes up go yes!
Joseph Crawford responded on September 8th, 2006 at 2:54 pm | permalink
When i saw this post i ran over and grabbed Flock. It is pretty similar to FireFox however i have ditched FireFox and now primarilly use Flock. I have found it very nice to have the rss feed reader right in the browser and not have to use another application for it. I also like the ability to blog right from within Flock, however the editor does need quite a bit of work to make if function 100%. Also i dont believe the editor outputs valid xhtml and it should.
With these points i have choosen Flock and look forward to future releases/enhancements. Good work done on the browser so far.
And for the record MAC RULES :) OS X Anyway.