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Browser of the Week: Flock Impressions

I’ve been using Flock all week, and I have to say that I’m pretty impressed. Flock is way out in front of the pack in driving innovation in the browser space (although Mozilla is catching up with their various Labs efforts). It’s refreshing to see a vendor thinking big and experimenting with adding all kinds of bold new capabilities to the browser.

Specific things I liked about Flock:

• It’s based on Firefox, so it feels like Firefox with a bunch of extensions installed for the various social features. I didn’t get any of the cognitive dissonance one might expect when switching to a new browser. It didn’t migrate my numerous Firefox 3 windows and tabs when I installed it, but I was able to fix this by copying the sessionstore.js file from my Firefox profile by hand.
• The blog editor is simple and convenient. The Web Clipboard is a better mechanism than bookmarks for grabbing links, pictures, etc. for later blog posts. For example, I used it to gather links for my Bits and Bobs articles. Configuring the editor to post to my WordPress blog tooks seconds and worked without a hitch. Unfortunately you can’t add WordPress tags to your post directly in the editor, so I had to add them afterwards by hand (a major drag). Apparently a fix for this is already in the works.
• There’s a nifty button in the tab bar for adding a new tab so I don’t have to grope around for the right mouse button.
• Like Firefox, Flock detects when a page has RSS feeds and displays an icon in the URL bar. But it also detects search engines and media feeds. So you can add a new engine to the search box with a single click, or browser media (images and videos) in Flock’s very slick media bar.
• At least some (and perhaps all) Firefox extensions appear to work without modification. I spent less than five minutes on Facebook, with it’s skull-shattering Flash ads, before I was compelled to install Flashblock. I grabbed it from the Mozilla add-on site and it works perfectly.
• Flock makes heavy use of “yellow bars” (modeless alerts displayed at the top of the browser window) to keep you abreast of what’s going on. Most of them can be turned off by clicking a “don’t show this again” checkbox.
• A little icon lights up next to users in the Facebook sidebar when they have shared new pictures. One click and you’re browsing them in the media bar.
• I’m sure a lot of users will appreciate the photo uploader. Personally I don’t take a lot of digital photos so I didn’t try it.

The biggest drawback of Flock is that it is gunning for a moving target. The version I tested (1.1) is based on Gecko 1.8, the platform that underpins Firefox 2 (yes, this will be on tomorrow’s quiz). Gecko 1.9, which serves as the basis for Firefox 3, has much improved memory consumption and performance, which I missed immediately upon switching to Flock. And once you’ve experienced Firefox 3’s awesomebar, it’s nigh on impossible to live without it. To be fair, Firefox 3 is still in beta, and Flock 2.0 (which will be based on Gecko 1.9) is under development and slated for release later this year.

More generally, it’s questionable whether Flock’s fancy social features have a strong enough appeal to attract a significant user base when compared to heavyweights like Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. The blog editor built into newer WordPress versions is pretty good in its own right, and it’s a darn sight easier than switching to an entirely new browser. Many if not all of Flock’s features can be duplicated using Firefox extensions. The fact that Firefox benefits from a robust third-party developer ecosystem, rather than relying on a single company to implement advanced functionality, means that it has already leapfrogged Flock in some areas. For instance, the visual impact of the PicLens extension blows away Flock’s media bar.

There has been much speculation about Flock releasing a Firefox extension instead of continuing to push its own browser brand. This would certainly help to solve many of these issues. At the same time, the technical challenge would be significant since they would no longer have the luxury of adapting the guts of the browser to their specific needs. (I’ve got my share of experience with complex Firefox extensions, however, and I don’t believe the task would be impossible.) A bigger obstacle is the fact that Flock relies primarily on a search partnership with Yahoo to generate revenue. Finding a viable business model for an extension would be much harder, although I think some of the ideas I mentioned earlier this week might be applicable, particularly the notion of tracking surfing habits and delivering highly targeted and relevant ads.

Radical steps along these lines will probably be necessary if Flock is intent on world domination. If they are content to carve out a niche among the digital avant-garde with a very slick browser boasting a range of innovative features and a straightforward business model, however, they seem to be on the right track already.

Blogged with the Flock Browser