Flock Logo

For the past few months there has been a lot of hype about a new "social browser" coming onto the scenes. This is Flock and it's based on Firefox. I'm a big fan of Firefox and like to be on the cutting edge and test all the beta releases, so I signed up to be notified when Flock was made available.

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email telling me to head on over to https://www.flock.com, download Flock and be awed by this new "social browser designed for Web 2.0", so that's what I did.

I downloaded Flock for Mac and got playing. I setup my details to get my delicious links (Flock uses these instead of standard bookmarks), I setup access to my blog so I could blog directly from Flock (without having to go to my site first) and I setup access to my Flickr photos and got playing.

To be short - I don't like it. The only new things it offers over Firefox are those mentioned above and the ability to search your history from the search box, and even then, I wouldn't say these new features are particularily good.

The delicious idea is quite a good one, but I want normal bookmarks too. I use delicious to store interesting URLs that I think others may be interested in (hence it's in the sidebar on my front page) and stuff I'd like to come back to once, maybe twice in the future. Certainly not ALL my bookmarks - loads of which are only accessible from work, or once I've connected to work's VPN, so they're no good to others.

The blog tool adds too much spurious HTML to the post for my liking. This HTML is then there when you try and edit a post in the WP admin interface. As for the Flickr integration - other than making posting photos in my blog entries easier, I can't see any benefit.

There's also the limitations - most extensions don't work with Flock yet, no Solaris version (cos the Sun chaps in Beijing haven't compiled it yet) and probably most annoying of all... everytime you open Flock, you're prompted for your delicious login details so it can load your bookmarks. It doesn't remember your login details.

Sorry folks, all that hype was a complete waste - I'm not impressed and I'll be sticking with Firefox. I might check back when the next version is released.