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October 21, 2005

Flock, the social browser

I've been testing out flock, a new Mozilla based browser. It's at a "developer preview release" stage (aka Alpha) and I want to know what all the fuss is about. So I downloaded and ran it. Here are some suggestions/comments I posted on the forums at flock.com.

I'm a long-time firefox user and I've been using 1.5b for a while to help out. I wanted to have a look at flock, so here are some things that  have come up in the last few minutes using flock.

I've got used to quick searches in the address bar in FF - I can customize my search really fast without selecting from a menu. Admittedly it's often google but when I want images or local or mail I like the shortcuts I've set up in FF that I can't import or set up in Flock.

I have a the "bookmarks toolbar" on FF with my most common links and "live bookmarks" (slashdot, wired...) On flock it's kindof disabled - I can't get at it from any menu or right-click on it, but I can drag shortcuts onto it. And there they are stuck. If I want to have a old-skool bookmarks, i should have it, or else have no choice at all of using it. I'm currently looking for the config file where the link i dragged on to test is stored so I can remove it.

Forward and backward buttons do not have the customary dorp down menu to skip back two or more pages. I often use this, I miss it. It may spoil you clean lined skin, but please can I have it back?

I really like the blog integration - I'm now typing this in flock - and the flickr bar as well. It's aimed that services other than flickr and del.icio.us will be linked into the browser at a basic level, but now, it accesses and adds to my del.icio.us bookmarks rather than a bookmarks file stored on my PC - which really makes sense, since if I'm looking at my bookmarks, I'm online, so why store an off-line file?

A few other things have occured to me as I write this:

• The blog window has no title, so shows up blank here in the XP taskbar. Minor annoyance - might be nice if it showed up as "This blog title - Blog Editor - Flock Developer Preview - 0.5pre" - in a similar way to how an email window (eg. in thunderbird or some outlook thing) picks up the subject of the email  as you enter it.

  I've had one crash so far. Can't work out what I did to trigger it and no real way of telling the flockers. Firefox 1.5beta came with a bug reporter extension already installed. Seems like a plan that should be looked into to me.
  

  This blog editor has jsut screwed doing an unordered list (bullet points) It looks so fat like it's given me indented paragraphs, and clicking the bullet button above gives me a second level bullet. The clicking un-indent gives me the indented para again (no bullet). And I can't un-indent to be at the top level after this paragraph either. This probably needs a bugzilla and to be checked for reproductability.
  

I'm in my movable type backend on the website now, actually posting this on the site. It seems that Flcok did not set up my blog properly, I did the automatic setup and it found the directory and file but would only allow me to publish to one of the blogs set up on this site, not the main one, here. A little diappointed by that, but here it is. Changing the setting form MetaWeblog to Movable Type did not help.

Technorati tags: flock del.icio.us MovableType

Posted by hounddog32 at October 21, 2005 08:47 PM

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Posted by: Anonymous at October 21, 2005 08:47 PM

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