Just hours before Flock went live, I received an invitation to download the developer preview (version 0.4.8). Being an early adopter, I decided to test it by making it my full-time browser for a few days. (I’m back to using Firefox for now.) Since it’s a developer preview, I’m not going to spend time discussing rough edges and bugs. (Except to mention that 0.4.8 would become unusable in less than an hour due to a horrible memory leak. Version 0.4.9 does not appear to have this problem, as far as I can tell.)
There were two aspects of Flock that I found particularly intriguing. The first is the integration of its bookmarks with del.icio.us. The first thing I did was to start copying my Firefox bookmarks over to Flock. I soon realized that there was a problem: There’s no way to keep bookmarks that I don’t want to share from appearing on del.icio.us. I’d rather not tell the world where I do my banking, what companies I have credit cards with, where we keep important things at work, etc. Also, I found that I really missed the keymarks that I had set up for the bookmarks that I use the most. If two things are changed, I will probably switch to using Flock full-time.
The second feature that I was interested in using was the blogging tool. Overall, I was pleased with how easy it was to set up and use. My only complaint about the editor itself is that there’s no way to switch from WYSIWYG to HTML mode. I do not like the way tags are implemented. Rather than using the categorization system built into WordPress, Flock dumps “Technorati tags” right into the body of the post. I don’t know if this is done because WordPress does this in a non-standard way (if there’s a standard way to do this at all). But it will have to change before I use this part of Flock.
Overall, I think Flock shows a lot of promise. However, before I can make it my primary browser, some things will need to be changed.
And could someone please tell me how Flock plans to make money?
4 Comments
Feh. Money. More people need to learn the value of doing things without greed being a (the?) driving factor. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Mozilla doesn’t exactly charge for any of its’ incarnations or relatives, and they’re perfectly decent — if not the best available — clients. :-)
Some people need money to feed, clothe, and house themselves. I don’t really call that greed.
I believe Flock has already taken a round of venture capital, which means they’d like to make some money. I’d just like to know how they intend to do so.
I hate to burst your bubble, but the Mozilla Foundation has set up a for-profit company around Firefox.
You say that as if I (and others) weren’t in the position I’m in… But that’s another topic. :-)
There’s a fundamental difference between earning a living, and suddenly wanting 14 cars instead of 1. I don’t recall hearing anything about a Mozilla-related bankruptcy, so the sudden desire to charge for something that has been established as reasonably distributed for free — for quite some time, and long before Mozilla made anything other than its’ self-named product — isn’t out of a need to scrape by. I’m pretty sure those who develop Firefox and Thunderbird have clothing, homes, and probably an ass-load more. Sorry, man. It’s just not believable.
Guess I can’t say I’m surprised about the news in that link. Just about everyone else has decided to start charging for things that are / should be free, or raising current prices beyond reasonable levels. Isn’t even limited to technology companies, either.
…if that isn’t greed, what would you call it? :-)
I found that there is a not-so-obvious way to view posts as HTML. Either I missed it in previous versions or it’s something new to version 0.4.10. My guess is that it’s the former.
One Trackback
[...]If so, one of my complaints about Flock will no longer be valid.[...]