Jared McAteer’s Blag - jaredmcateer.com

So I downloaded the Flock browser today, and in fact I am writing this post using it’s integrated blog feature. I decided I wanted to give it a chance and see how it lives up to the hype. I try to avoid hype, I’m practically immune to it, so when something sets of my hype radar it’s usually worse than I think it is (ie. AJAX, iPods and Ruby.) I’m a late early adopter to things, I try to hold them at bay long enough that I don’t get burned by early editions of the technology.

That said, I was updating my extension (more on that later,) and decided to see if it worked in Flock as I knew that it is in public beta. A few things caught my attention and I’d like to speak about it.

First and foremost, the integrated blogging feature, I love it. It makes blogging easy and fun, particularly the web snippets feature where you drag stuff into the blogging window for future use, handy. That is if I could get it to work… it says to drag text and images there to save them for later use, but when I follow the instructions nothing happens. I can add a note to it by right clicking and selecting “Add Note” which then gives me another text area to enter a note… I can then use that to add to my post later. I actually JUST had an epiphany, this little feature allows me to copy images and text from my CURRENT blog post that I’m writing (like right now) for later use. Ok I can understand that, but it’s not particularly intuitive, I think the Flock guys might want to look at clearing some of that ambiguity up.

Next up, the live bookmarks, I love the fact that they expand so that I can read the entire title of an item, this is actually one of the thorns in my side that I have with Firefox’s default implementation especially with feeds like, Fark, where they include the link types at the start of the title so all you get to see is “[Scary] Some guy was caught humpi…” so you get the Internet equivalent of a soup can without a label for supper. The down side to Flock’s implementation is that it only lists a maximum of 15 entries. This is a problem with sites like digg where their feed can go through that many entries in less than an hour. I also don’t particularly like that live bookmark menus won’t open up without having to click twice on it when one is already open (once to close the current menu, another to open the new one.) This seems like a bug that needs to be ironed out later.

Some dialogs require you to click on the parent window that spawns it to show up. For example I’m in the Accounts and Services window and I want to set up my favorites sharing (speaking of which why is Flock using the Microsoft name for Bookmarks? nevermind…) and I click on the “Setup Favorites Sharing” and nothing happens, I sit there for about 5-10 seconds thinking maybe it’s loading something. I get impatient and I click on the button again and bam there’s the dialog to setup my del.icio.us account (or Shadows.) So I type in my username and password, it begins the “logging in…” process and nothing ever happens, so just because it worked last time I begin clicking on the thing just to be sure. Nope thing. If it tells me something before I finish this post I’ll be sure to come back to this section and update.

Another usability issue, when setting up my “favorites sharing” there’s a link to open a new account, despite the fact I’ve selected in my option to open links that are intended to open a new window to open in a tab of the most recently used window, guess what happens, it opens in a new window. Just to be sure I checked to see if the Accounts and Services window is modal, it’s not. So I try ctrl+click and middle click, ctrl+click acts as if I wasn’t holding down ctrl, and middle click does absolutely nothing. Nothing major, but annoying none-the-less. It seems to do this on just about everything, even logging into a website when it asks if I want to save the password, surely this is not a bug that they are shipping, even a beta, with is it? I’ll have to double check all this stuff when I get home and make sure it’s not just my work computer.
Next up I wanted to see how it handled Java applets, they are my second biggest peeve in Firefox because it tends to hog the whole browser until it’s finished loading. I noticed in IE7 beta it didn’t do this and I really hope it’s a feature the Mozilla guys are working on. Wow what a chore, considering the amount I run into them when I don’t want to see one you’d think finding a real world example to use wouldn’t have been a problem. But it took me a good 5 minutes to find one (It’s still “Logging in…” to del.icio.us) I found that the Java plugin either didn’t work, or worked poorly. On one page where the Java applet opened up it showed the “Addition plugins are required…” bar, when I click on “Install Missing Plugins” it just shows a progress bar going on forever.
Interesting note, at this point the “Logging in…” progress bar for the Favorites setup has seized, it’s doing nothing and has not generated an error… I wonder what will happen if I click on it. Nope nothing.

The saving grace of this all is the main browser window and this blogging window are still functional and responsive. They have not been affected by the infinite loops that the other two seem to be in. I know that Flock is still in beta so please don’t start sharpening your knives just yet, I do like the browser, however, it still has a long way to go to replace Firefox as my primary browser.

ps. As I click the publish it brings up an option dialog, the one thing that I am disapointed to find is that it can’t create categories to publish to on the fly, which for me right now is a little bit of a downer as my site is still lacking the content to have all the possible categories I want setup already. Not a huge deal just though I would mention it.

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Technorati Tags: browser, beta, Flock

This entry was posted on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Browsers, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.