Flock Beta

I noticed that Flock released a beta of their latest offering recently. (Actually, it was a while ago, this one’s been sitting around for a bit) I’m not really involved with Flock anymore though there are times that I think I’d like to get back to it. I was working really hard testing it up until MiHwa came in December and then I stopped abruptly for obvious reasons. After she left I found it hard to get back into but mostly I was put off by the lack of progress in the three months that I was gone. Heads would roll around my office if there was little to no progress in three months. I do feel bad ’cause Lloyd is a great guy and I kinda feel like I’ve abandoned him. I guess because I have. Not him as much as the idea.

I recall being so excited when I first read about Flock and then frustrated when I didn’t get invited to the beta. So I wrote to them and told them I wanted to help out. Wow, the next thing I know, I’m a flockstar! I spent all my evenings testing, reporting and confirming bugs. I was so deep into the forest, I couldn’t see the trees. I had forgotten why I moved to Firefox so long ago; it’s a quick, compact and tidy little browser.

Now I’m not slagging Flock; it’s a very cool browser but it’s just gone in a different direction than I’d like to see. Social everything… All these added ‘features’ yet there’s no way to turn them off if you don’t want to use them. Really, I don’t need to be alerted when my contacts post a picture to Flickr or updates their blog. That’s what Bloglines is for. I like their implementation of the shelf, but not their bookmarks management.

Bookmarks implementation has always kept me from using Flock on a full time basis. In the early days there was no way to import which is a bit of a deal breaker though it wasn’t really stable enough to use daily anyway. Now that the browser has matured (and it has matured alot) the bookmaks are stored in a manner which removes any directory nesting you might have done. *ugh*

{Updated} I’ve been using the latest quite a bit lately and it’s a great browser. I’m still not a fan of how they handle Bookmarks (they call them Favorites) but at least they put the Open in Tabs button back. I mentioned that to Lloyd the last time we talked, so maybe I wasn’t the only one who missed it.

My only complaint is that it’s a bit sluggish and hard on the CPU. Other than that, it’s a lot like Firefox with some cool features (which can be disabled). Worth a look…

Technorati Tags: Flock, beta, Firefox, Flickr, Bloglines