Interesting article / discussion on the Flock browser here, including some responses from the developers themselves.
Personally, I’ve seen a bit of the Flock browser now, and I think my summary of it is “cute”. One of the main things I kind of felt about Flock from the beginning is something that the author of this post alludes to as well - Flock aims to provide a whole bunch of “solutions” for use in the “new” web (don’t get me started on the “Web 2.0″ label), but solutions are only usually really good when there’s a problem that they’re actually solving.
I kind of see the Flock craze as a similar thing to the Ajax craze right now: mostly fluff. Ever since someone gave the asynchronous javascript with XML technique that’s been around for years a fancy name, Ajax has become the cool thing to do in web dev. And don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly cool for some things, and I’m sure it will be the basis of a lot of the cool stuff we’ll see on the web in the next couple years; BUT most people right now are using it to do stuff that adds no additional functionality or usefulness to their existing web systems; like posting blog comments and refreshing the list, for example.
Flock kind of strikes me the same way; there’s nothing that Flock does that I’ve been saying “I wish I could do X in Firefox”. I know I might feel differently if I used delicious (which I don’t - another thing I don’t see the point of, for my use). Sure it does some things differently, but for me it’s not worth the switch.
2 Comments
Just like tabbed browsing I think you need to look past the issues you have with the “cool” factor or things that the devs push through marketing. Actually look at the things that can benifit you and if they don’t talk about them.
If you don’t like something don’t discredit it because it might be deemed hip or you have mixed feelings about marketing, discredit it because you don’t like the functionality.
Delicious is not everything that Flock offers.
I’m just saying if you don’t like something fine, but don’t be punk rock about it.
I don’t dislike it just because it’s the latest trend, because I really hate that mentality.
I know that Flock does other things too, and I did think that the blog posting thing was cool, just not enough to make me switch browsers.
My last paragraph of the post really sums up my feelings on the subject; I switched to Firefox (actually I switched to Mozillla before Firefox was around) from IE because there were a lot of good reasons, not only for me, but reasons that apply to everyone. Flock (right now - and I do realize that it’s in the very early stages and may get a lot better) doesn’t do the same thing for me, because even after I’ve seen all the features I still don’t really think I’d want to use most of them. Weighing that against all the really useful Firefox stuff that Flock doesn’s have (at least right now) makes it an easy choice for me.