-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Bart Decrem, a developer that used to be with the Mozilla Foundation and left back in early 2004, has released a beta version of the browser he envisioned while working on Firefox: Flock.
You can read the press release here: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27115 And you can download the beta here: http://www.flock.com/developer/ I've been playing with it this morning and here are my thoughts so far: It's got some interesting concepts, but it is definitely beta (duh) and has some annoyances. What's interesting is that these bugs and annoyances are why the Firefox team dumped Bart's Flock development tree back in late 2003, which ultimately prompted him to leave the team in 2004. Good things I see: 1) Remotely-stored favorites (see caveat below). 2) Excellent caching (this is the big gripe a lot of folks have had with Firefox). 3) Excellent local indexing of visited sites for local searching of history (this is the kind of thing that makes you wonder why we never had it before - heh). 4) Excellent crossover compatibility with the Firefox extension base (developers need to do very little to port their extensions for Flock as well as Firefox). 5) Excellent RSS notification and aggregation display. 6) Overall an excellent usage of the OSS Mozilla codebase. Bugs I've noticed so far: 1) You cannot delete an RSS feed from a favorite without deleting the favorite as a whole, even if both items were created separately (i.e. you "starred" a page on a visit, then came back later and subscribed to its RSS feed). 2) While your favorites can be stored remotely on del.icio.us your feeds are stored and aggregated locally. 3) You cannot choose which favorites to share on del.icio.us. You either share them all or share none. You can manage them directly on del.icio.us but that is an extra step that most folks won't do, and before you know it folks will be sharing favorites that include their session ID at their bank's site. Very bad juju. 4) Newly "starred" favorites do not seem to populate the Favorites tool bar, even after restarting Flock. 5) The "Import" function doesn't do anything. Annoyances I've noticed so far: 1) There is no 64-bit client for any platform. 2) If you use the del.icio.us plugin for shared bookmarks you are prompted for your login/password every time you start the browser. 3) The small and efficient "Close Tab" button that is always in Firefox at the right-most area of the tab bar is missing. This means you have to get mouse focus on any tab you want to close, or use the hotkey shortcut. 4) The "Create a Blog Post" button is in the main Navigation tool bar by default. While it can easily be removed by customizing the tool bar, this is an extra step that shouldn't have to be performed by default. Not everyone in the world feels like publishing their mental drivel, and they should not feel compelled to. 5) In a new tab or freshly-opened browser, the address bar does not have focus. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFDWnNL8iwHek1OcGYRAk7YAKC5wP/3aaTtpuhb+ui+RQT388OhugCdFvr9 ES53VsfoRit4ybqppYp8kBk= =kRa/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
