To Flock or not to Flock

This was suppose to be a dinner for three. Internet Explorer - the fat guy, Firefox - the outgoing cool cat and Opera - the slim girlie. Now Flock's in advertising himself as the herald of love, "the social web browser".

I wasn't keen on checking out the new guy. Having three browsers installed seemed pretty enough and Flock was undergoing constant development anyway. Now with version 1.0 out I decided to give it a try and see if that might be something for me. Download was rather slow so I guess I'm not the only one trying out some new toys. Installation's the same I was used to from the Firefox experience. Not surprising, since Flock isn't really anything more than Firefox in disguise.

Importing data from Firefox went smoothly as well, including the usual bookmarks (weirdly following the Microsoft convention of calling them Favorites), but also passwords, cookies, sessions and history. Preferences were mostly also copied over, oddly Flock decided to change the folder I set for downloads back to the Desktop. Seeing some Firefox users' desktops I keep wondering who made that a default setting in the first place. Since a lot of people don't change it computer screens end up being pretty trashed.

Anyway, starting Flock for the first time was a bit tricky. The default home page about:myworld (neat name), is heavily JavaScript dependent and one of the scripts was doing a great job consuming 100% of the computer's CPU time, which in turn forced me to kill the Flock process twice before it got usable.

The overall look is nice. More modern then the classic Firefox and probably more appealing to a standard user. A lot of windows are missing the special look though and seem to be taken right out of the parent browser. The default search engine is Yahoo, which does suggest some kind of sponsor-relationship between the company behind the browser and the portal. Even changing the default search engine to Google kept me exposed to Yahoo's features - where writing in the search field would usually show a list of suggestions from Google, shows the same in Flock from Yahoo and only from there.

The cream on Flock's cake are supposed to be the additional tools for social activities. Several popular services are integrated into that, including Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube and others. It's a decent selection, although some of the more serious social services like LinkedIn or Xing are oddly missing. Even worse, there isn't any officially exposed way of adding services. I suppose Add-ons can to the additions, although making it more obvious would certainly profit users.

My Blogger account was quickly recognized and saved so I moved on to the blog editor. This one's interface is very Firefox-ish and doesn't really fit the rest of the browser. Too bad. The functionality covers basically all that's available on Blogger's web interface. There is no way though to manipulate the date of the post or set options like allowing/disallowing comments. Saving a draft stores it only locally and not in Blogger. On the other hand loading drafts from Blogger just doesn't seem to be working. Perhaps both ways it's just a bug.

The RSS feed reader is neat, could use a better look perhaps. Shows feed contents, allows saving, viewing in one or two columns and with a selectable amount of details. I'm missing an option to just show unread channels and posts. Overall it's nothing to drop Google Reader for.

The clipboard seemed like a nice idea. Being addicted to Microsoft OneNote I probably wouldn't like to have a separate repository for web related notes and content, but still lots of users would benefit from such a tool. Disappointing is unfortunately the only word I can use for Flocks clipboard. It's nothing but a drop for whatever one finds on websites. These can be viewed, blogged or deleted and by means of a tiny icon placed into folders. Where's the search function? I can't imagine managing such a collection effectively without having search and perhaps additionally tagging.

The features I will not dare testing are the media related (mostly Flickr integration) and the People sidebar, simply because I don't use any of the available there services. Bookmarks (well, favorites) are the same old stuff as usual. Perhaps Flock's team decided on Firefox's own innovation to come with version 3.

Overall it's a good a browser as Firefox is, compatible with most if not all available so far add-ons. Judging innovation over the original I'd give it a 3 on a scale of 10 - unimpressive. If I was to drop all the Web 2.0 services I use now in favor of browser built-in tools, I'd better get something damn more attractive then there is to Flock. For the time being, my answer's not to flock.