philcrissman.com

I said awhile ago that I would try Flock out for 2 weeks. That just came to a close, and I have to say, I’m very happy to be using Firefox again.

Now, I did get used to Flock. But it had no features that compelled me to continue using it, and quite a few that dissuaded me from wanting to continue. I took notes as I saw things; as you can see below, I didn’t really find much more to comment on past the 12th. I think by that time I had seen & tried all of Flock’s features that were applicable to me. My observations below:

11-8-07

• Twitter in the People sidebar doesn’t stay updated; it’s always about 5-10 minutes old. This makes it, effectively, useless; it could use a refresh button, and an option to view replies only.
• Blog posting tool; works great, but… I like to edit in source code, but with the shortcut buttons provided by the Wordpress editor.
• CTRL-tab, or opening a window in a new tab, opens right next to your current tab, rather than at the end of the row. There are actually times I wanted this to be an option in FF, but having it do this every time can be annoying. I’d rather have it go to the end of the row by default, and next to my current tab iff I add another key (alt-ctrl-click? Is that taken?).
• The search bar; in FF you can change the engine on the fly, just go to the drop down and click a different one. In Flock, if you choose another engine, it searches for the input box’s current string, automatically opening the new search page, even if there is an empty string there. To make a different search engine stay up there, you need to actually make that engine the default. :-(

11-9-07

• Crashed without warning, only 8 tabs open, and none of them should have been very taxing client apps…

11-10-07

• Already quit using the integrated blog posting tool, I’d rather use the Write page in WP.

11-12-07

• Hate the way Flock adds Feeds by default, to itself. I use Google Reader; I want RSS items I click to be added to Google Reader. I’m sure flock has an option for this (UPDATE: It does): it should ask you the first time you add a feed what you want to do with them.
• Have noted that where Flock opens a new tab actually seems to have a bit of randomness to it. I’ve had it open new tabs right beside the current tab; if you continue opening new ones, it sometimes continues opening them to the right of your current tab. Other times, it opens them at the far right, like Firefox. Once, I had it open them to the left of my current tab. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it; sometimes it does it one way, sometimes another.

I really tried to be objective. I think 2 weeks was sufficient time for Flock to win me over, if the features it had were those I’d really use. Although I’ve expressed how I don’t really care for Flock’s default theme, I came to ignore that pretty quickly once I got used to it — it really doesn’t affect how you use the browser.

But having used it for a couple weeks; I’m done. Back to Firefox. Flock is a fine product, and there may be people for whom it’s combination of features and social networking/web 2.0 integrations are perfect. I’m just not one of those people.