Flock is dead

2005.11.02

Guest post by Mahangu Weerasinghe

I found a firefox extension that lets me blog from within my browser. So what, you ask? Well, it renders Flock practically useless.

Throw in the Lazy Sheep bookmarklet for del.icio.us, and you really wonder what’s up with that huge (7.9mb Linux) download for Flock. The theme? Well that’s a really bad reason to make a whole new browser.

I think the problem with the whole Web 2.0 buzz is that everybody is jumping on the bandwagon too fast. I mean the Flock development team are obviously very talented. Why did they waste their time creating something I can do in a jiffy with two simple Firefox extensions. Once my Grease Monkey scripts kick in, my FF is cruising high above Flock in terms of both speed and functionality.

Hmmm.. what would be great though would be if someone made a neat package of Firefox + a few useful extensions. That way, I could just point people towards that download, and not have to worry about walking them through multiple Extension installations.

Permanent Link | Filed under: FOSS, Thoughts

7 Comments

Comments Feed

  1. Daryl

    November 3rd, 2005 at 2:53 am

    I take your points, and the approach you mention was actually part of our early plan, but as we progressed, we decided we wanted to tackle something bigger, change the way people browse. We’re not there just yet, but that’s the vision. As has been pointed out elsewhere, browsers all behave in the same fundamental ways. Maybe that’s good for some people. We hope to make the browser behave in better ways that make the two-way web more two-way. Our offering isn’t necessarily for everybody; that’s for sure. But I wouldn’t pronounce us dead just yet. Much innovation faces resistance at first. :) Thanks for your comments on Flock.

  2. Mahangu

    November 3rd, 2005 at 8:12 am

    Hi Daryl,
    It’s nice to have an actual developer comment on a post you make. :) If you read my earlier post on this site, you may realize that at first, I was very optimistic about where the browser was going.

    Right now though, I really can’t see why you guys couldn’t have just developed a really cool set of Firefox plugins. A suite of plugins even, that had an accompanying theme. I most definitely would have used something like that.

  3. Prabhath

    November 3rd, 2005 at 5:14 pm

    I can stand another browser, but I can’t stand another sub-standard rendering engine. Hopefully Flock will continue to use Gecko so life won’t get more difficult for us web designers. What we don’t want is Opera-style unpredictability.

    As Zeldman mentioned:

    If an obscure company in Sri Lanka came out with a fully standards-compliant browser with .05% market share, we’d be happy to endorse that company’s product.

    This is deviating from the point, but the more Flock stays close to FF, the better for people who make websites.

  4. Beyond Atari

    December 4th, 2005 at 8:57 pm

    I think your missing a vital point - Flock is the cool new “must have” free download. It doesn’t really matter what browser is “best” (since that is probably Camino, don’t you think?), Flock is just so “now”.

  5. Prabhath

    December 4th, 2005 at 10:20 pm

    Ah, Mac zealots :-P

  6. Justin Perkins

    December 6th, 2005 at 8:50 am

    I like using delicious for my bookmarks, can Firefox do that?

  7. Prabhath

    December 7th, 2005 at 2:58 pm

    As with everything Firefox, there’s a delicious plugin for FF.