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Friday, October 21, 2005

Flock Not Ready for Primetime

Last night I tried out Flock, a new Mozilla-based browser that's getting a ton of buzz. The press is chiming in here too. Originally just a handful of people were invited to try Flock, which is in developer preview. Unfortunately, Flock installers quickly spread around town and the company released it out to everyone to try.

On the whole, I like the concept of Flock. It's a social browser. Your bookmarks, instead of being housed on your PC, are stored online at del.icio.us. You can also add tags to your bookmarks. And last but not least, the browser also features integrated RSS reading and blogging. You can try it here. Oh and if you don't have a blog, they will give you a WordPress weblog.

Unfortunately, the product really isn't ready for prime time use. (Wordpress.com isn't either from what I saw, but that's another matter.) Flock is horribly slow - at least on OS X - and worse, the feature set is really really confusing. Firefox, even when it was a 0.x release, was ten times more mature. Maybe that's why it hit 100M downloads - it works! Like Om, for now I am scratching my head over Flock. My suggestion is to keep it simple, guys. Give me something that makes my life easier, not harder. So thumbs down for now, but I will give it another look when you ship.

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Flock Not Ready for Primetime:

» Flock Soars Like An Ostrich from Business Logs
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... [Read More]

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Shelley Powers knows that it's fall when a hot shower feels really good, that 36 hours makes a good train ride, and that Flock is fun. (Mark Evans doesn't dig Flock, and Steve Rubel is iffy, but they probably agree... [Read More]

» Sticking Up for Flock from Buzzword Compliant
Flock released their Developer Preview with caveats and warnings written in a font size larger than the H1 of anyone else and lots of people seem to have taken them to task because its Flock Not Ready for Primetime. This doesn&#... [Read More]

» Flock Off? from Net
There have been quite a buzz around the Mozilla-based social browser called Flock but now the buzz seems to have turned against them. Apparently the performance is pretty slow, even more than Firefox. Steve and OM are scratching their heads [Read More]

» Flock Developer Preview from Wholesome Goodness
I've spent a decent chunk of this weekend playing with Flock, the new social browser that's out in developer preview [Read More]

» Does the world need yet another browser? from TechBlog
Flock, a new Web browser, received a lot of hype prior to the unveiling of its developer preview late last week. As usually is the case with software that gets a lot of buzz, reaction to seeing the real thing... [Read More]

» Flock Developer Preview from Wholesome Goodness
I've spent a decent chunk of this weekend playing with Flock, the new social browser that's out in developer preview right now. I'm not going to say much about it that a lot of other people haven't already said better than I ever could, but here are a ... [Read More]

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