Nidahas » Musings on design, web standards and free software from a Sri Lankan geek.

Flock

2005.10.21

Guest post by Mahangu Weerasinghe

So I bit the bullet and downloaded Flock, a fork of everyone’s favourite browser. Despite all the skepticism about reinventing the wheel, I think the dev team has done a pretty decent job.

Alright, I know I already posted a short entry on my blog in the heat of the moment. However, after playing around with it a little more, I thought I should do a little more of a review, and figured Nidahas would be the place to post. Flock, after all, is free.

Anyway, here’s my two cents worth, for now. Flock is good. It’s a fork of firefox and thus uses the best web rendering engine around. I’m not sure what extensions work with it, and what don’t, and naturally there are going to be problems if you expect it to work exactly like Firefox. It’s a fork, not a clone.

Having said that, there are some pretty nifty features. For one, the syncability (yes, thank you, my coinage) of your offline bookmarks and your del.icio.us favourites is pretty cool. Why’s that? Well, I can now share my bookmarks with everyone via my delicious page. No more cludgy delicious this! bookmarklets - I just bookmark something, and Flock syncs with my del.icio.us account in the background. Pretty neat.

Onboard blogging is also cool. Find something interesting while browsing? Just hit the blog button and write your post. Most weblog APIs are available in the drop down menu, and although I can’t vouch for all of them, I can say that Wordpress works fine. I posted this entry from within Flock itself. Of course there are some problems with the WYSIWG and formatting - syntax glitches which hopefully will be sorted in the upcoming betas.

Of course there are a lot of other features which I’ve missed out, but I won’t spoil it for you by telling you everything. Saddle up and take Flock for a spin (no pun intended :)).

• Flock for Windows
• Flock for MacOSX
• Flock for Linux

I’m using the Linux flavour, and well - it’s insanely simple. Just download and execute the bash file. :) Conclusion? Flock definitely has a lot of potential, and just may be the browser which bloggers end up using. The great thing about FOSS is variation and Flock certainly brings another nice flavour to the Firefox camp. In the end however you wonder - couldn’t all this have been done with extensions? Right now, these features just don’t seem to warrant a seperate fork of what is already an excellent browser.

In any case, I’m keeping my eyes (and mind) open. Let’s see what the next few releases bring us.

Permanent Link | Filed under: FOSS, Thoughts

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