Brian Morris wrote:
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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.
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Thanks, Brian.
This is also just came in on CNET:
New browser gives taste of Web 2.0
http://news.com.com/New+browser+gives+taste+of+Web+2.0/2100-1046_3-5905922.html?tag=html.alert
--
http://WilliamRoddy.com
"I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box
when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it."
--Terry Pratchett
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