Today I decided I am going to make a serious effort to trial this Flock product I have heard about and to be honest download over a month ago now. Flock is a derivative of Firefox. For those who don’t know what Firefox is, well it is an Internet Browser e.g. Internet Explorer (comes free with your PC since the early mid-90’s).
Flock had received lots of press in the developer community when it was first announced because many see it as a Fork of Firefox. Now simply put a Fork can be bad and the reason is because it has the potential to dilute the value of either product and therefore weaken a developers desire to support either product. This may sound silly to non-technical people but there is a lot of precedence in the software world to support this belief i.e. Linux. You may have heard of Linux and figured it was a single product but it isn’t. There are hundreds of variations out there, so many that there is a consortium that was started called UnitedLinux just to try to bring some kind of development uniformity to their respective versions. We still don’t know if UnitedLinux will work but how it happened is obvious and the reason developers are concerned about Flock is founded.
Anyway back to my point, so I have been using Flock for the day and I have only found a few things so far. As I discover issues, I will mention them in my blog so keep an eye out under categories ‘flock’
Issue No.1 - I found it crashes - big shocker there, not. Yes this browser that is an early developer release crashes, this isn’t a big deal, but it is an issue.
Issue No.2 - Flock has about 5 officially supported extensions, that is pretty minimalistic even for a developer release in my opinion because it means I can’t use the browser most of the time because I need my extensions e.g. Blinklist, ViewSource Chat, IE Tab and IE View. Thank god they have the Web Developer extension though.
Issue No.3 - This is a personal peeve of mine so take it with a grain of salt, it doesn’t seem to be working with PageFlakes. Why? This doesn’t seem to make much sense to me because PageFlakes should only be interacting with the Gecko (the core engine of the browser that both Firefox and Flock have in common) which means it should work.
Issue No.4 - Just discovered this issue while trying to publish this post from within Flock, I can’t copy and paste when inserting an URL e.g. http://www.lucky.com
Issue No.5 - Again part of the blog posting mechanism - I tried to copy and paste an already entered Hyperlinked post from inside Flock and it immediately assumed I meant it as a click and opened another Window. Hey guys sometimes you need to copy and paste sort it out.
At the end of the day Flock version 0.5ish is a good product already and I really look forward to seeing the 1.0 result of this effort.
Good Luck guys.
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