Joining The Flock

By Kelmon

The Browser Wars were something that, for a few years, were consigned to the past. Microsoft came, beat the crap out of Netscape, and conquered the Internet. So, it was with some surprise that we discover that the Browser Wars are not only back again but are much more interesting. While Firefox has, for the most part, got most of the publicity these days, I thought that I’d contribute to things by posting a review of a new pretender, Flock. This review is based on the recently released beta (version 0.7) under Mac OS X but my review is equally applicable to the Windows version that I am running at work (less a couple of Mac-specific annoyances that I’ll come to a bit later).

Right off the bat I’ll say this. If you have any interest in publishing information on the Internet (blogging or posting pictures) then you have my highest recommendation to go and download this browser now. Seriously, stop reading this, go and download it, and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll still be here when you’ve finished installing.

All done?

Great. I’d also better start this article by saying that I’m kinda biased to the idea of a 2-Way Web as I wrote my dissertation on blogging in IT projects. Given this I’m very open to the idea of a web browser that incorporates publishing functions more so than a lot of people who, for reasons best known to themselves, bash the Flock project for basing itself on the Firefox browser.

OK, so we’ve already noted that Flock is based on the Firefox browser. This is a good start since Firefox is already known as being a fine browser but it’s one that I don’t use (unless necessary) because it lacks features that I find in other browsers, such as Safari (mostly it’s missing an RSS reader). Flock builds on the Firefox browser by adding a nice collection of features that makes it easy to publish information along with (I think) a swish new Look & Feel. This review looks mostly at what these new features are and how well they work overall. More importantly, this should hopefully answer the question of whether Flock is right for you because, in fairness, it’s not for everyone.

Search

Let’s start at the beginning. When you start up Flock for the first time you’ll note that it looks a bit like most browsers with some function buttons, an address bar and the ubiquitous Google Search. We start with the Google Search and I’ll come back to the buttons in a moment. The Google Search, by default, is a Yahoo Search but one with a difference. As you begin typing in the Search field the browser will start searching for you across your Favorites, History and Yahoo itself, providing you with an evolving list of the best results, as well as the option of performing the search on other sites, such as Amazon.com and Wikipedia. Pressing Enter causes the usual search on Yahoo and this can be changed to your preferred search engine, plus you can add additional sites to search (I added the movie database IMDB.com, for example). One of the principal reasons why I didn’t use Firefox much was that it lacked Inquisitor, a cool Google Search enhancement that was released initially for Safari and then later for Camino. The Flock Search field is, arguably, better than Inquisitor since it allows you to search your Favorites and History as well as Yahoo, but I do feel that more information about the search results could be provided (Inquisitor provides the summary of each search result so you have more confidence that it is what you want) and the font size larger so I don’t have to squint so much.

Photobar

While the toolbar provides the usual Back/Forwards, Stop and Home buttons, it also provides 2 buttons that will be alien to most people. The most interesting of these (as far as I am concerned) is the Photos button. The Photos button, when selected, brings down a film strip of pictures (by default) from the Flock project’s Flickr account, which is more of a demonstration. Naturally, you can add your own Flickr or Photobucket account, plus you can add the accounts of anyone else with public pictures. In effect the Photobar function acts much like an RSS reader but for photographs with the same ability to discover new “feeds” of data on websites that provide them. While navigating the Web these days you increasingly encounter websites where images are hosted not on the website’s server itself but rather are linked to images stored on the likes of Flickr and Photobucket. The impact of this is that if you move your cursor over a picture on the website that is hosted on one of these photo sharing sites then a small picture icon appears in the bottom-left of the picture. Selecting this icon causes the associated Photostream to open in the Photobar, allowing you to browse the other pictures by the author and view them at the appropriate hosting site. If you like the pictures posted by a particular author then you can set the Photostream as a Favorite so that you can not only easily find the stream again but also be notified when new pictures are posted (the Photos button on the main Flock toolbar develops a small gold badge in the bottom-right of the icon when new pictures are available). In the same way that I got addicted to RSS with Safari, Flock is now getting me addicted to Photostreams as I have found a number of good photographers on Flickr, have set their streams as Favorites, and now keep monitoring the new pictures that they post when the little gold badge appears.

Photo Uploading

The provision of the Photos function in Flock can generally be thought of as Apple’s iPhoto Photocasting function for everyone else. However, Flock goes further by also providing an upload function to get your pictures into your Flickr or Photobucket account. Selecting the Uploader button in the Photobar opens a new window that allows you to set a batch of pictures to upload to your account by either drag-n-drop into the area at the top of the screen or by using the file browser of your operating system. Pictures that are added in the batch can be individually edited to provide a name, description, Technorati tags and public/private status, the pictures themselves can be rotated and cropped in a preview window, and you can specify/create the collection on your account that the pictures should be sent to. The process is very simple and works better than other tools that I have downloaded in the past, most of which are iPhoto Export functions.

My News

Having already mentioned RSS earlier it is worth mentioning that Flock includes an RSS reader that, while not as full-featured as standalone readers, is generally more capable than those that I have seen for Firefox as extensions (IE7’s is better in some areas but Safari’s still beats all browser readers). Navigating to a page with one or more RSS feeds available causes the Address Bar to display the RSS icon that can be clicked on to show a listing of all the feeds. Selecting a feed from the displayed list causes Flock to open its RSS reader (called “My News”) that allows the user to both see what the RSS feed looks like and provides the opportunity to subscribe to the feed in order to receive notifications of new articles. Management of feeds is relatively simplistic in the current release allowing the user to group related feeds together in folders (selecting the folder shows allow the feeds from that folder aggregated together), select the on-screen article length, and select a single or double column view. Each article displayed by the viewer can be flagged as read/unread, saved as a Favorite and used as the subject of a blog post by selecting the appropriate icons shown at the end of the article. While the reader functionality is quite acceptable, it is lacking the ability to filter articles in the same way as other readers, such as by the assigned blog categories (as in IE7) or by keywords (as in Safari), although the standard Firefox “find as you type” search function can be used.

Snippets Bar

Flock is very much about publishing information on the Web. While it is expected that the user will construct much of their own blog posts, it is also understood that they will likely wish to incorporate information found on the Web itself. To aid in the construction of new blog posts Flock provides the Snippets Bar, located at the bottom of the screen, to allow the user to drag content (pictures, text and URLS) from web pages into the Snippets Bar that can then be used later when constructing a blog post (yes, it’s a glorified clipboard). Content dragged onto the Snippets Bar can be used in blog posts where dragging the content into the post will typically bring some degree of meta-data as well as the item that you saved. For example, dragging a portion of text from a page will result in the text being automatically quoted with a link provided back to the originating page. Finally, while you can use content on a web page to create new Snippets, you are also free to create your own Snippets to record your own thoughts/ideas for future reference in much the same way that you can create a Sticky Note in OS X.

Blogging

Since I’ve described using photos, RSS articles and Snippets in blog entries, let’s talk about the Blog Editor itself. Flock ships with a Blog Editor that is capable of posting articles to the major blog engines using XML-RPC, so this can be blogs created on the likes of Blogger.com or ones created using a downloaded weblog engine on your own site (I tested Flock using WordPress 2 on my own site). Once you have successfully configured the editor to post to your blog account(s) then you can use the editor to construct your posts in a WYSIWYG fashion, although the on-screen representation does not take into consideration the CSS active on your site (one drawback). The editor itself provides the usual gamut of tools (bold/italic, bullet points, links and spell checker) and a tab allowing you to both view/alter the source HTML of the post being constructed. The overall feel is much like that of the online WordPress editor except that it feels faster and it’s much easier to add web content using the Snippets Bar. The only limitation that I have so far found with the Flock Editor (aside from the lack of a “true” preview) when compared to the WordPress 2 editor is that Flock is unable to upload files to your site, such as a PDF that you wish to allow readers to download, and that it is unable delete previous posts (although you can edit) and create/manage Pages created for your site. Given that I have only tested the editor with WordPress I am unable to say if limitations exist with other blog engines.

Collections

No web browser would be complete without a means to store bookmarks back to web pages that you’d like to go back to. For Flock this functionality is both a strength and also an Achilles heel. In line with its remit of sharing with a community, Flock allows the user to easily mark a web page as a favorite (by clicking the large star button at the beginning of the Address Bar) and also share the bookmark with others by uploading it to a bookmark sharing site, such as del.icio.us. The process of bookmarking a site can be very fast (simply click the “Star this page” button) or more in-depth by placing the bookmark into a Collection (folder, to you and me) and optionally applying Technorati tags. Management of your Favorites is performed using the Collections Manager that does a reasonable job of allowing you to edit the properties of each Favorite and organise them into Collections. Unfortunately, where this breaks down for me is that you can’t nest Collections and the “simple” method of marking a page as a Favorite can lead to an unorganised mess. The first issue is a known problem that I believe the developers are planning to address while the second is perhaps a fault with the way I work. In much the same way as desktop search engines like Spotlight and Google Desktop have, to a degree, removed the need to create complex folder hierarchies to store files, perhaps Flock’s Search function removes the need for me create such folder structures for Favorites as well. Time will tell on this one, and I know that browsing my Favorites will become difficult, but maybe this is for the best.

Mac Gripes

OK, I know that the Mac OS accounts for like 0.2% of the PC market but there’s a bunch of functions that every browser should support if it’s ported to the Mac. Flock, in much the same way as Firefox, Seamonkey and Opera, completely fails to support these functions and it drives me nuts because it keeps a great product from being truly fantastic. Without further ado, these are my gripes:

1. No support for Network Preferences. Almost every Mac application written for OS X (and maybe earlier OS versions for all I know) know that the System Preferences contains information on how the computer is connected to a network at any time. Flock and the other cited browsers, however, require you to set this information again in each application and update it whenever you change networks (such as moving from a wired office network with a proxy server to a home wireless network). You have to do this with Windows as well but on a Mac you shouldn’t have to.
2. No support for Keychain Services. The Mac OS provides a service for securely storing usernames, passwords and the like that can be easily backed up and browsed (as long as you can authenticate yourself). Flock (and the others) on the other hand, insists on storing your username/password information in its own format that can be browsed (Yay!) but isn’t encrypted (Boo!).
3. No support for Dictionary. The Mac OS in the latest version introduced a system-wide dictionary/thesaurus that allows for a “check spelling as you type” function in any application that supports it. Flock, I’m pleased to say, does include a spell checker but it’s not “check as you type”, you do have to train it for words that you already trained the system-wide dictionary for, and you do need to download your own language packs unless you want American English (yick).

This isn’t a major list but these really do bug the heck out of me and, since Camino manages to support all of these whilst also being based on the same engine as Firefox, I fail to see why Flock can’t. Mind you, I am happy that they do support the Mac so maybe I should count my blessings.

Memory Management

I came across a few comments about Flock that indicated that it was a memory hog and so I decided to test this myself using an unscientific test. For this test I opened the same 4 Websites (BBC.co.uk, Aelon.net, CNet.com and Gamespot.com) in their own tab in Flock 0.7, Firefox 1.5.0.4, Safari 2.0.3, Camino 1.0 and Opera 9 beta. The results, as shown by the screenshot from Activity Manager, shows that Flock did use the most memory (87MB), Firefox was 2nd with 81MB, Opera was 3rd with 72MB, Camino was 4th with 65MB and Safari used the least (48MB). So, Flock does use more memory than the others (all browsers were closed before the test was started) but not significantly more than Firefox. What I can also confirm is that all 5 browsers running beat the snot out of my aging PowerBook (as illustrated by the CPU usage graph being completely full, probably due to the Flash running on CNet.com and Gamespot.com) and I was glad to shut them down.

Conclusions

It’s probably easiest for me to provide my overall conclusions by saying that Flock is currently my default browser, both at home and at work. It was already known that Firefox is a great browser for surfing the Web and Flock adds some great new functions, particularly the Search and Photobar functions. The Snippets Bar and Blog Editors, along with the Photobar makes blogging really very simple without needing to leave the application that you’re probably already using to find something that you want to blog about. As noted, I’m not sure about the Collections function but I’m going to persevere with this and see whether if I can get on with it.

But, the question is, is Flock the browser for you? The answer to this question depends on what you want to do on the Web. If you simply wish to be a consumer of information then Flock is probably overkill since its strengths lie in the new features that it provides to allow you to publish information easily. Equally, if you are a big Firefox user who relies on a number of Firefox extensions not already covered by Flock’s features then you’ll want to check the Flock Extensions page to make sure that they are available. However, if you do want to publish photos and blog articles then Flock is a great browser that I highly recommend you to check out.

Trackbacks:

• Joining The Flock » Project Syndicate