I am ending my month-long experiment with the Flock Browser. I continue to be in love with what is promises, and continue to be disappointed with how it delivers.
For those unfamiliar, Flock is a fork of the Firefox codebase which is supposed to integrate all the popular web2.0 services in a cohesive way. I was excited about it because it supports most of the services and technologies that I use regularly, including Digg, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Del.icio.us, wordpress, RSS, and Gmail. The way that it brings these things together, though, isn’t quite what I’d hoped. Let’s take a look a what I feel it needs to do better before I give it another try.
Social bookmark integration
For a product that prides itself on social network integration, I had taken it for grated that online bookmarking would be the default, if not the only, behavior. With my tendency to use multiple browsers on multiple computers at multiple sites, I have for years used online bookmarking through del.icio.us more than extensively…I use it to the complete exclusion of local bookmarks. That’s right, I don’t use local bookmarks at all. I was frustrated, then, when I had to fight with Flock’s settings to get it to use my del.icio.us account exclusively.
Still, with a little wrangling, I got it to create bookmarks the way I wanted it to. So now it should populate my Bookmarks menu with them dynamically, right? Well…no. To access a bookmark, I have to click Bookmarks, expand the Online Bookmarks menu, expand the Del.icio.us menu, and then expand the desired tag. That’s right – my bookmarks start after four levels of drop-down menus. That kind of thing makes HCI people cry.
On the other hand, Yahoo!’s excellent official Firefox extension for del.icio.us, which doesn’t work in Flock, does everything I need simply and painlessly.
Blog editing
Flock lets me right click on pictures I find on the web, and choose “Blog This” to start a new blog post and embed that image into it. Cool! Unfortunately, it deep links the image, which is not cool, so I find myself still blogging pictures in the old fashioned way in order to see it done correctly – manually putting the image either on Flickr or uploading it through wordpress, and then manually constructing the IMG SRC code.
Gmail
Flock integrates with my GMail account, but it’s unclear exactly what this means, except that it makes GMail take twice as long to load, and frequently breaks the page. I haven’t found a single feature which changes my GMail experience in any way. Technically, Flock attempts to process mailto: links by starting a GMail message, but even this trivial feature is broken due to a Google API change, and can be achieved more reliably by installing the Google Toolbar in Firefox. I’ve grown so resistant to wanting to wait to load GMail through Flock, that I’ve started keeping another browser open to do email.
Photo management
Flock has a built in upload manager for putting photos onto photo sharing sites (We use Flickr). Excellent. The Flock photo uploader actually works well, and is pretty much a feature-for-feature re-implementation of the official Flickr Uploadr application (version 2, which I still prefer). It’s not any more useful than Uploadr, though, and it raises the question of why I want such a tool built into my web browser at all. Integrating a feature that doesn’t involve any web pages into a web browser doesn’t save me time or simplify anything…it’s just fluff.
Flock also has a “media bar”, that allows you to browse online photo thumbnails using a pretty slick native interface. Being able to drag and drop embed links out of this and into web forms is really cool, but I otherwise haven’t found a use for it. Flickr’s web site does a much better job of organizing thumbnails into a coherent “stream” than Flock does, particularly for large sets which Flock has no simple way to scan or search through.
RSS
This is probably just me. I hate almost every RSS aggregator that I’ve ever tried. Flock’s is not an exception. In fact, I think it’s the furthest removed from my workflow of any client I’ve tried yet. Flock’s quite cooperative about turning this off and sending all my feeds over to Google Reader, but so is every other browser.
“People” summary
Flock has an array of interesting internally-generated portal pages and sidebar summaries for showing you all kinds of things about what’s going on in your social network. None of them are outright bad, but none of them are as useful or personal as a good online portal page, like iGoogle, Netvibes, or the dozens of other offerings out there. I spent weeks fiddling with “My World” to try to make it into a useful start page for me, but it never showed me quite what I wanted.
Performance
Flock feels like and acts like it was written in Java. I don’t know how to express it better than that. It’s sluggish, ungainly, and it pegs the CPU for minutes at a time on some of the most seemingly simple tasks. It’s just as bad in Linux as it is on my Mac. It just makes everything take longer.
So, I’m done with Flock, on all of my computers. Browser experiments will continue.
Hey Andrew,
I’m very sorry to hear that you’re leaving Flock. I think you raise some valid points here, and I’d like to speak to them below.
Social Bookmark Integration
Keep in mind that you are a power user…most people don’t use online bookmarking, and if we started publishing their bookmarks online by default, they’d probably freak out.
That said, Flock 2 will eliminate one of these levels of navigation to get to your online favorites: they’ll now be listed in a folder, rather than a whole new section. It’s still not completely ideal, but it’s a bit better. Additionally, I believe I’ve heard that the Yahoo! delicious extension does work in Flock 2.
Blog Editing
It’s actually within Flickr’s Terms of Service that you have to link back to Flickr, which we respect with our image embedding. We also figure this is a nice thing to do for all images: stealing images from other peoples’ sites without permission isn’t nice, so we assume that most people are ok linking back. If not, that’s what the source tab is for.
Gmail
Perhaps you missed the Webmail icon, which is under the refresh icon. It’s pretty small, so I can understand that. Clicking this icon will provide you with a list of recent email, the ability to refresh that list, compose a message, or hop to your inbox. I can understand how if you didn’t find that, our integration would seem pretty lacking.
Photo Management
You, like me, probably spend most of your time on the computer in an area with internet. It’s hard to remember that not everyone has wireless everywhere, and some people even still have dial-up! The advantage to Flock’s Photo Uploader (and Blog Editor, and Feed Reader) is that you can prepare your photos while offline, without having to load a heavy web interface. This is very valuable if you are away from a connection but still want to get your photos ready to publish.
Media Bar
Perhaps you missed the arrows on the left and right of the Media Bar that allow you to quickly scan through a photo stream, or the “Filter this stream” option in the search box that allows you to search it.
RSS
I can totally understand this not working for some people. I’ve heard both sides of the coin on this feature…people just use RSS differently. I’m glad to hear you found it eaasy to switch to Greader!
People
Maybe this is just not your cup of tea. Many people find it very useful to be able to view and share with their social networks without them taking up a whole web page. Try dragging a photo, link, or text to a friend in the sidebar, I think it might open up a whole new world for you.
MyWorld
I’ll be the first to admit that MyWorld is not as customizable as iGoogle or Netvibes. Right now, MyWorld is more of an aggregator of what you do in Flock, not a true online portal page. That may change in the future.
Performance
Flock is based off of the technology powering Firefox 2. Obviously we’re a bit heavier because of all the features layered on top. You’ll be happy to hear that Flock 2 (coming out later this year) is powered by Firefox 3 and has significantly better performance. If you’d like to try the beta, you can get it at http://www.flock.com/beta/download
As I finish writing this (ginormous) comment, I realize that a lot of your complaints are covered by features we have that you missed. This is obviously concerning…you shouldn’t need a Flock employee to tell you why Flock is good or where our features are!
Do you have any thoughts on how we could make these features easier to discover? We’re constantly reviewing our UI, but an external perspective is always helpful. How can we make it easy for you to discover all of Flock’s features on your own?
Thanks for taking the time to write this up…we really do appreciate getting the feedback, even if it indicates we still have some work to do.
Flock’n'roll,
Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com