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Flock zero point nine

Flock 0.9

A new version of Flock is out, 0.9, inching towards 1.0, and I have to say they have made it even more confusing and bloated. There is now a proliferation of tiny icons, a new “My World” screen which exhausted its usefulness in 10 seconds and an updated skin which took a decent skin (I’ve long wanted a Flock skin for Firefox, just the skin, not any of the Flock functionality) and added curves and doohickies, rendering it inelegant.

I’ve tried to like and understand Flock because some very good programmers are involved in it. But the concept, stuff built-in media and social features into Firefox, never seemed right to me (how about an extension or set of extensions rather? Or just use the web) and its performance is still frustrating. Firefox is dog slow to load but Flock is worse.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 9:16 am and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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    • v
    I installed it last night and man is it slow. Looks pretty though ;)
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    • v
    Hey Paul,

    Sorry to hear that Flock 0.9 is not sitting well with you.

    Regarding extensions: Flock is a browser and not extensions for two major reasons. First of all, extensions are (from what we've seen) only used by less than 10% of Firefox users. Secondly, one of Flock's biggest draws is the integration between features. You drag'n'drop photos from our Mediabar to our Web Clipboard to use later, send articles from our feed reader directly to our blog editor, etc. It's very hard to achieve integration like that with extensions.

    Regarding performance: I'm really sorry to here you ran into performance problems. As we're built off of Firefox 2.0 we do inherit all associated performance issues and have our own. I would be curious to find out if you have any extensions installed...extensions can be performance hogs on Firefox and Flock. That said, we are concerned enough with Flock's performance that we have a whole team spending dedicated time on this issue for our 1.0 release. If you don't stick with 0.9, I hope you give us another look then.

    Thanks for the feedback!

    Evan Hamilton
    Flock Community Ambassador
    evan at flock dot com
 

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