However, in some ways it managed to get worse and not better, especially in regards to the “favorites.” Regular Firefox can import bookmarks from Opera, but Flock would only allow me to import from Firefox or from a file. I would imagine Windows user can import IE Favorites, but I didn’t bother firing up the virtual machine to find out. Not being able to import directly from Opera wasn’t that big of a deal and isn’t a deal breaker. But what it is a dealer breaker for me is when looking for a Favorite in the Favorites sidebar, it is unable to locate Favorites that I know are there. For example, I belong to an online critique group called Critters. So I attempted to find that Favorite in the search field at the bottom of the sidebar and there was no results. The only Favorites I was able to locate were the ones that came with browser in the “Favorites Toolbar.” Acting on a theory, I moved all the favorites to the favorites toolbar and tried again. Still I was only able to find the default favorites by searching and none that I added myself. This is bad and is enough to prevent Flock from being a daily use browser for me. Yes, I can play like it’s 1997 and browse for the favorites in the top toolbar, but why would I? Maybe people coming from IE 6 on Windows, won’t mind but users of Firefox and Opera will likely be as annoyed as I am about this. You should just be able to go into the bookmarks sidebar, and search for a favorite and find it, if it’s a default bookmark or not.

Another peculiarity that I noticed was how Flock handles the search engines. If I want to search using Google, I should just be able to go to the drop-down and select Google to search.  However, when I do that, Yahoo (the default) is no longer in available even in the drop-down! To get Yahoo back, you have to go into Search Preferences and check Yahoo int he “Include in Search Elsewhere” section.

I discovered these quirks even as I was thinking that Flock wasn’t so bad anymore, even if the theme is a bit overdone for my taste. In short, it remains a bizarre bastard child of Firefox for user that don’t actually browse the web, but are more interested in trendy “We d 2.0″ services.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, browser, web, internet.web2.0, hype, buzzwords

On a Thursday, dark and dreary, I pondered weak and weary

“Flock’s Favorite’s Manger is eternally slow, oh deary”

And I thought and thought

But my thoughts were for naught

until I to myself I did say

I’ll figure this out, come what may

It is contacting someplace , I thought on intuition

And this thought did, in fact, come to fruition

Into my root console I did type tcpdump -i eth0 port 80

To see if the browser is doing something naughty

The Tell Tale console spilled the browser’s sins forever more:

tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode

listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes

23:51:14.278812 IP 89464-www5.cedar.flock.com.www > 192.168.0.22.60802: F 746684168:746684168(0) ack 3241799097 win 6624

23:51:14.319144 IP 192.168.0.22.60802 > 89464-www5.cedar.flock.com.www: . ack 1 win 6432

23:51:18.267828 IP 192.168.0.22.60802 > 89464-www5.cedar.flock.com.www: F 1:1(0) ack 1 win 6432

23:51:18.324766 IP 89464-www5.cedar.flock.com.www > 192.168.0.22.60802: . ack 2 win 6624

You see, to home it is phoning

When you do Favorites Managing

The interface is cluttered and ugly. The foreward and back buttons look right and left buttcheeks, only blue. Maybe you could say they look like the buttchecks of somebody suffering from hypothermia and are reminiscent of the asscheeks gracing IE 7. The refresh button is next and is a ripoff of the same button on the Mozilla Orbit family of themes, only made hypothermic in color and somehow the curved arrows are all blurry and poorly rendered. The Home button looks relatively normal, only there’s a strange blue light coming from within the house. Maybe the house is haunted by the Ghost of Human Interface Guidelines Past. Next we have what looks like monitor of a PC suffering the Blue Screen of Death (Trademark Microsoft Corporation, I think…) only with the faint silhouette two blobs burned in the screen. I think they’re supposed to be nipples from a baby bottle or something, since they certainly don’t look like people. Next is a button who’s function isn’t obvious until you hover the mouse curser over the unfortunate thing. This is a square with some sort of blue stripe on it. This turns out to be the rss newsreader. This is most vague and ugly icon that I’ve seen on the default toolbar of any browser since I was using NCSA Mosaic back in the prehistoric days of 1995. Next, inside the address field we have a hideous blue blight. This is how you “star” a webpage, which means to add to the Favorites. I have to say this: I’ve read some reviews saying that bookmarks have “lost their cool factor” Bookmarks never had a cool factor in the first place and were never meant to be cool and IE favorites suck like a transvestite whore on Hollywood Blvd (try not to think about it too much, you’ll go mad) The address bar and the search bar look normal, although a Google search would been better than Yahoo; but I guess the Flock folks have to obey their masters.

The “browser” achieves a terrapin feats of speed. For starters, the thing is slow to load at least on this machine (1.67 GHZ Athon XP, 1 gig of ram running Ubuntu Linux. Granted not the fastest clock time anymore, but a browser shouldn’t use a lot of cpu cycles just to load :p) Flock takes about 8-9 seconds to load, compared to 2-3 for standard Firefox, which is still slow compared to the Opera browser. The cause of this slowness seems to be flockFavoritesWebServiceBokee.js. Also opening the “Favorites Manager” in Flock is unbelievably slow, taking 2 to 3 seconds compared to say instantly with every other browsers bookmarks sidebar. Speaking of which, what drug addict decided to make CTRL-B the keyboard shortcut to blog instead of accessing the bookmarks, I mean favorites. I guess you need to blog several times a day in order to browser the web?

Much has been made of the browser’s “integration” with various websites. But exactly how many del.icio.us extensions are there for Firefox anyway? A zillion dozen? Oh that’s right, you won’t necessarily have each and every single one of your bookmarks instantly on that site the minute you bookmark it. I wonder why you would need that? I would think del.icio.us would be for unique and interesting sites that are hard to find otherwise, not for say news.google,.com, for example. I’ve heard people say this is good for backup of your bookmarks. I better idea for backup is to just save your bookmarks.html file on a site, email it to yourself, or even on removable media. It would take years for me to go to del.icio.us and try to rebookmark all those sites. Using the method for saving bookmarks I’ve just described, I’ve kept the same basic bookmarks file since Netscape 1 across operating systems and computing platforms.

Flock is also “integrated” with WordPress, with a word rich text editor thing. I wouldn’t call it a word processor, but more along the lines of Wordpad. This supposedly gives you one click blogging or some nonsense like that. However, WordPress and other blog sites already have a text editor! All you have to do is bookmark the editor ( https://(username).wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php) and put it in Bookmarks toolbar. Instant one-click access to blogging tools without bloating the browser itself! Of course, to do this you’ll need to be arsed to learn a tinybit on how to use the software, not that this is advanced use or anything. Here’s one more bit of irony about that. A mshtml.dll based browser would have make more sense to have a text editor. The reason being is that Trident has poor css and javascript support, unlike Gecko and Presto (Opera) and is therefore more likely to bork on things such as a online word processors.

The photo uploader is ok, I guess. The first time I tried to use, I somehow uploaded an entire directory’s worth of files to Flickr, even though it said it was only uploading the 7 files that I dragged over. How this happened, I have no idea. There is no “upload all” icon or anything along those lines that I could have accidentally pressed. Anyway, after you upload files, a stupid “photobar” populates on your screen and gets in your way until you get rid of it. This is annoying as hell. I find that unless you need to upload a whole lot of files, hitting the file upload button on the given photo site probably makes more sense. For a lot of photos, a file uploader would make sense, but as separate small application and not part of a browser.

I’m not sure who would use this as the daily browser for an extended period of time once the novelty wears off. I also don’t see a lot of Firefox users switching on permanent basis. The reason I say this is because the unfortunate mutant is the anti-thesis of the purpose of Firefox. Firefox began as a fork of Mozilla to clean up the interface and dispense with unneeded features and create smaller, faster browser (Yes, that’s very simplified, but I’m not here to give a history lesson on Firefox and Mozilla :p ) What Flock is doing is adding new and different bloat and dubious features back Firefox, only with features that make less sense on webbrowser than what was stripped from Mozilla to create Firefox. So who is the user base for Flock. People that don’t know any better and those all hyped up about the “Web 2.0” fad and buzzwords.