Lots of people punning about Flock now that the somewhat stealth browser-thingie is in wider beta. I have to confess, however, that I’ve messed with it and been largely unimpressed. It is nowhere near as feature-rich as my preferred browsing tool, Maxthon, and the only interesting distinct feature, integrated blog posting, consistently screwed up commas and quotes when posting to this site. While I’m not convinced Flock is a pure raise-VC-money ploy, as some cynics think, I’m also not very excited by what I’ve seen.
Am I missing something? Would a Flock fan (or three) care to enlighten me about what I’m missing?
Related posts:
I got “qualified” for the developer beta program this morning, so I downloaded an played around with it a bit. I am umimpressed as well. Not sure what is the advantage of using it over just plain ‘ol firefox.
Paul…I must admit I was anxiously awaiting Flock and considering the hype, was largely disappointed. I’ve only begun to play with it but that is my first impression (in particular I was expecting a much richer experience with the blog editor).
Flock Soars Like An Ostrich
With the private beta scrapped because of P2P leaks of the Flock installer, the bird team decided to step-up and drop a public beta into everybody’s laps. Their Flock homepage is full of disclaimers, but that didn’t stop some people…
I just got the beta, and for the most part I too am not impressed. However, I do like the history search, which appears to not be a feature of Firefox. A description from the Flock site…
#
History Search
Flock comes with the open source Clucene search engine built in. Each time you visit a web page, it indexes all the content on that page so you can easily retrace your steps later. Pages you’ve starred as Favorites float to the top when you do a History Search. History Search is stored locally for privacy. For more privacy, you can wipe it out using the Clear Private Data command.
Example:
1. Visit some interesting web pages, such as Yahoo News.
2. Start typing a few letters of a search query (for example “tech”) into the search box.
3. After you type a few queries, a menu appears showing you matching results from your browser history and pages you have starred. You can use the keyboard to navigate through the menu.
4. When you press Enter, a normal web query is done using the search engine you have chosen.
Hi Paul, I am very happy to hear that you stick to Maxthon. I am SVP & Partner at Maxthon and I would love to hear about what you would like to improve in Maxthon and what you feel is missing. We are planning a major release within a couple of months that will move Maxthon into the Web 2.0 space.
All the best,
Net
Hi Net, I hope we’ll have a chance to connect shortly!
Paul, a couple of things:
1- Our integrated History Search, described in the comment above, is one of my favorite features as well. Every time you visit a web page, Flock does makes a full-text index of the page and lets you search through that from the search box using a Spotlight-style UI. When you hit enter, the search box will do a normal web search.
2- Yup, there are still a ton of bugs in our product, including the ones in the blog editor you point out. We’re fixing bugs every day and spinning new builds every few days, so some of the things that annoy you may be fixed in a build that’s coming out over the next few days.
3- The reason we put the code out there is that people asked us to act more like an open source project, so we’ve released our source code and binary builds, and tried to be very clear that this is not a consumer beta by any means, but a developer preview.
4- We like to think that our browser has interesting new ideas in the areas of blogging, bookmarks and history and RSS integration. Have you checked out the way we create a dynamic aggregated RSS view for any bookmarks folder (we call them Collections)?
In any event, we’re hard at work collecting feedback, fixing bugs and working on a consumer grade beta which we hope to have ready by mid-December. Hopefully you’ll take another look at Flock at that time and will like the progress we’ve made.
Cheers,
Bart Decrem
Flock