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.
Steve,
I've actually had the opposite comparitive experience with Flock and Firefox. Flock is significantly faster on OSX. It is, however, buggy as one would expect with an almost Beta release. You're probably right that it's not ready for Primetime - but it is a promising new entry to the browsing world.
Posted by: Bill Kinnon | Friday, October 21, 2005 at 01:52 PM
I think your thoughts really sum up the general feeling about Flock - it doesn't really offer a big enough incentive right now to make the switch from Firefox.
Posted by: PeteCashmore | Friday, October 21, 2005 at 07:55 PM
Steve, did you use the del.icio.us tie-in of Flock's? I found that both Flock and standard Firefox with the Foxylicious plugin, are all but brought to their knees by trying to read in and render my sprawling del.icio.us account.
I've spent a day going through and tidying my account (merging and removing tags) and it performs a bit beter now.
Posted by: Ben Helps | Saturday, October 22, 2005 at 06:40 PM