fox on fire!

Firefox 2 is out! (And there was much rejoicing).

I know IE7 was released a few days ago, but come on.

Filed under: browser

Flock blogging

I’m starting to get used to Flock.  Yay Flock! Its blogging/photo features are outstanding.  There are a lot of rough patches, though, which I suppose reflect its less-than-one-point-oh status.  I don’t even think they’re calling it a beta.  And for good reason, I must say.

For example, each tab in Flock has a ‘close’ button.  One of the downsides of this is that when you’re crowd-tabbing, you’ll click on a tab to read it, but mis-aim and accidentally close the tab instead.  I think they’re planning this for Firefox 2.0, too, which would be very inconvenient.  Though, I’m sure someone will write an extension undoing that anyway.  Heh.
Speaking of extensions, I love that you can now import a lot of the Firefox ones.  However, when using the undo-close-tab extension, the tab should reappear where it was originally, not at the beginning of the row of tabs.  I don’t know why it does this in Flock.

Also, why is there no “Tag for del.icio.us” button like there is in Firefox
(with the delicious extension installed)?  instead i have to use the
keyboard shortcut or install another space-taking bookmarklet (which doesn’t appear as a pop-up).  How
inconvenient!

Another nitpick: when blogging from the browser, the blog window should not be positioned “always on top” – what if you want to refer back the page you’re probably blogging about?  It’s frustrating not to be able to get back to it, not even to pick up the web snippets you were going to use.

i also don’t like that you can’t modify the location of your bookmarks. it’s really annoying.  But, looking around in the forums, I see that there’s a reason for this.  Still, they should fix that before v.1.0

Like I said, the blogging, web snippets, and photo-sharing capabilities of Flock make it almost a must-have for the big bloggers out there.  These tools make it REALLY easy to post cool pictures, quotes, etc from all over the web.

But a lot of those other things still keep me from making this my exclusive web browser.  Since they ARE in their very early stages, so I have no doubt the experience can only get better.  Still, in the meantime, Firefox wins =)

Blogged with Flock

Filed under: browser

about flock

Flock is a new and different kind of browser.

Some people don’t know what a browser is.   These are the kind of people who, when they talk about "going online" or "using the internet," really mean "opening up Internet Explorer."

Take Annie.  During her user test, the developer asked her to open up Flock, and Annie had no idea Flock was a program; she’d thought it was a website.  So she didn’t know how to open up Flock, and the dev had to do it for her.  If he’d asked her to go on the Internet, she probably would’ve searched for the big blue e.

Later, Annie was asked if she knew what RSS feeds were.  She had no idea.  "What do they feed?"

This kind of person will probably not get much out of Flock.

One more thing: after the hour-long user test, the dev asked Annie which feature in Flock she found most impressive.

Annie thought for a minute.  "Well," she said slowly, "I thought that it was really cool that you could open up lots of websites in just one window.  And then flip through them using those tab things."

I’m pretty sure that a little piece of that developer died inside. 

That’s just one small hurdle the Flock people will have to overcome if they want to break into the browser market; they will have to make people realize what a browser is, and that there is more than one out there with which to "view" the Internet.

BUT, even if you *do* know what a browser is, and you know that Firefox kicks ass compared to IE, that still doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a lot out of Flock.  Especially if you know and use those little "extension" add-ons.

On the other hand, if you know what blogging is, and more importantly, you yourself are a "blogger," you might find certain things about Flock very useful.  And if you know what the phrase "Web 2.0" means (in the vaguest, most general sense), and you know what Flickr or Photobucket and Blogger and RSS mean: it’s very possible that you might be impressed by what Flock has to offer.

Like, I’m currently using Flock to update my blog with this post.  Instead of going to WordPress.com and opening up a new post from there, I just click the quill button at the top and a new tab opens up a "new post" page.  I can even choose between my Blogger blog and my WordPress blog for publishing (setting this up involves choosing the blogging service and entering your user info – not too painful).  

The coolest and most useful feature for bloggers would be the bar that runs across the top (which I can open/close as needed from the toolbar).  It can show all the photos in your Flickr account, and it can act as a sort of ’shelf’ where you drag various snippets of things you’ve found on the web for safekeeping until you blog about it later.  I dragged the Flock logo from their website to my shelf, so now I will drag it into this post, and voila!

 

This drag-and-drop function makes blogging tons easier to do, because you dont’ even have to cut and paste anything, really.  Even flipping between tabs is unnecessary because you have the shelf to hold your text and photos for you.

Since I use Bloglines for my RSS feed-reading, I didn’t find the built-in reader very compelling.  I like being able to access my 9 trillion feeds from anywhere in the world.  Maybe this feature is available in Flock, but as far as I can tell, it’s not easy to do.  Then again, I didn’t really try.  I really love my Bloglines.

The version I tested for Flock included a very impressive search box that did live search, with results showing up in a box as soon as you typed it in.  I don’t see that on the version I’ve downloaded, but hopefully they will keep that.  I had a lot of fun with that.

I haven’t tested any other features.  I thought their bookmarking system was pretty confusing; I also had trouble realizing that starred pages meant "bookmark."  Chalk that down to my own narrowmindedness, I guess.

 I know there’s supposed to be some voodoo magic with "social" features, like del.icio.us bookmarks and the like, but I haven’t dug too deeply into those yet.  Maybe that will make Flock more impressive to me.

So far, I think it’s pretty cool, as far as the blogging goes.   The rest of it isn’t quite compelling enough to make me switch from my first love, which is Firefox.  The deal-breaker for me is mouse gestures, although I’m sure they can fix that too (Flock is an offshoot of the Mozilla codebase).

So that’s it.  If you didn’t get much out of this review, well, I apologize.  The only reason I wanted to write this was so I could retell the story about Annie and the tabs, which I don’t think I will ever find not hilarious. 

 

technorati tags: web2.0

Filed under: browser, web2.0