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Hello again,
We are delighted to introduce the first beta release of the Flock browser, aka Flock 0.7. Here's what it is, what it isn't, and a company update.
Back in October, when we introduced the company and released our first developer preview, we generated quite a bit of attention. A lot of people were intrigued by the concepts we introduced, but one of the critiques we heard over and over was that the product wasn't ready for prime time (it wasn't - the version number was 0.4.something, but we did brag a bit too much). Moreover, some people wondered what problem we were trying to solve that Firefox plus a set of extensions couldn't solve. For the last six months or so, we've kept our nose to the grindstone, and now we're inviting you to try out our first beta release.
What problems are we trying to solve?
The web, and the way people engage online, has evolved dramatically over the past decade. We still see a lot of room for the browser to keep pace with everything that's going on on the web. Providing a fast, safe and simple browsing experience is very important, but at Flock we are also trying to look more broadly at how the web browser can enrich users' online experience.
For this release, and for at least the next year or so, we are primarily focused on supporting the social dimension of the web, and on bringing information closer to the user. Right now this includes a heavy emphasis on the photo experience (from upload through discovery to notification), RSS support, dramatic improvements to the search box (including a new take on favorites), and blogging.
In each of these areas, our goal is to offer an integrated experience that's easy to use and that leverages modern web standards. We are trying to build a web browser for the tens of millions of users for whom social engagement (sharing pictures, talking to existing friends and discovering new ones) is what they enjoy doing online. That includes people on MySpace, LiveJournal, FaceBook and YouTube, for example. If you are a power user (hint: if you use del.icio.us or a news reader or if you visit Digg, that probably means you) and if you have decorated your browser with, oh, say, 20 extensions or more, Flock may not be for you. We like these services as much as you do, and we share the basic values of transparency and control that are an essential component of the participatory web. We are trying to bring these services to mere mortals.
What do we like about Flock Beta 1?
Where to start? This first beta has a bunch of features that offer a glimpse at where we're headed:
- Photos: Sharing photos is one of the main ways people connect with their friends online, and we believe Flock delivers a rich end-to-end experience for Flickr and PhotoBucket users.
-
Uploading: Getting pictures online doesn't have to be tedious. In Flock beta 1, users can simply drag pictures onto the Photo icon to upload them, batch upload with our photo uploader, or even drag and drop pictures onto any form field on the web (we'll store the picture on your Flickr or Photobucket account, then insert the appropriate HTML snippet into the form).
- Discovery: On any web page (such as a Typepad blog, a MySpace page...), mouse over any public picture that's hosted on Flickr or Photobucket and we'll offer to show you the entire photostream in our photo topbar. And once you're there, you can scroll through thumbnails (including nice big ones) faster then ever before. It's fast and addictive!
- Sharing: Right click any picture to blog it. Or drag a photo thumbnail into any comment field on the web. Or drag a picture from your desktop into a comment field. Then talk about it.
- Notification: Keep a list of your photo buddies and Flock will tell you when your friends have new pictures. We'll import your Flickr friends list and let you add anyone on Flickr or Photobucket.
- News: RSS made easy. With Flock you can preview any RSS feed, then easily add it to your RSS aggregator (we call it My News). You can then view new stories by feed, by category, or aggregated across all categories (our front page shows you today's headlines). We also tell you when you have new stories - keeping you up to date at all times.
Search: We're delivering results to you, not just letting you search. As you start typing into the Flock search box we show you results from your favorites, your browsing history (Flock is the only browser that comes with a search engine built in - it indexes the full content of every web page, in real time), and live web results from Yahoo. We'll also show you a list of alternate search engines, so you can direct each query to the most appropriate search engine without changing your search settings permanently. And of course we let you customize the search box. Pick your preferred default search engine, and add any of 7000+ search plugins to the flyout menu. And since you'll be spending a lot more time in the search box, ours is wider and resizable. Put it all together and we believe we offer a dramatically richer search experience, where the most relevant results come to you.
Favorites and blogging: The changes here since our 0.5.x releases are less dramatic, but we believe we offer a solid, easy to use experience around favorites (click on the star button, share them with your friends, sync your computers, and use the search box to retrieve them) and blogging (works with most major blogging services).
It's a solid browser. This version of Flock is significantly faster and more stable than previous ones. It still has bugs, but we think it's ready to be used all day long, on Windows, Mac and Linux. And we've kept apace with the latest stable, secure version of Firefox.
We think it's fun. Seriously. When those buttons come to life to tell you that you have photos, or news, or that you're on a favorite, it makes us a little happier. We're trying to add a touch of delight to your browsing experience, and it shines through in places.
What do we not like about Flock Beta 1?
We still have our work cut out for us:
- Our favorites backend. OK, so we got a little carried away last Fall when we threw out the old model of folders and nested folders in favor of tags, collections and storing your favorites online. The "click, share, search" part of our favorites model works quite nicely, but we know we need to support nested folders so that when you import your favorites from other browsers, they appear where you'd expect to find them.
- Making it simple, integrating it all. Making it easy isn't always so easy. We've made great strides since our last developer release, but we still have a long road ahead of us. Let's look at one example. We love the star button and the experience we're aiming for is that you say "hey, this is interesting," click on the star button, and we'll take it from there. That's easier said than done, though. For example, in Flock 0.5 clicking on the star button would automatically create a favorite for the static web page you're on, and suck in any RSS feeds into our aggregator. But more and more pages have RSS feeds, so for this release we decided to break RSS away from favorites and deal with it as part of My News. We then added in the concept of "hey, this web page has photos associated with it" and introduced the concept of "Super Star" hidden way deep under that tiny arrow on the star button. If you Super Star a page, we'll create a favorite for it, add its RSS feed to your newspaper, and add the associated photostream to your photo favorites. Did we get that 100% right just yet? Probably not, but there are no easy solutions.
- Quite a few bugs. Check out our Bugzilla repository and the release notes for Flock 0.7.
What's next?
Support for more services! We have open APIs for extensions, search plugins, blogging services, favorites and photo sharing services. Hopefully in the coming months people will start creating service adapters that make more favorites and photo sharing services work in Flock. We'll also add some ourselves.
Fixing some of the things we don't like about this beta. See above.
Exploring how we can extend the same kind of notification and integration that we have today with photos and news to other areas.
It took us a while to get this release out the door, but we're going to push hard to get another feature-laden beta out this Fall and a polished 1.0 release towards the end of the year.
It's a journey
Building a browser ain't easy. Heck, it's taken Microsoft 5 years to add in tabs. We're one year into this. We've tried out a lot of different ideas, made a ton of mistakes and stumbled upon a couple of ideas that we think hold a lot of promise. Now that we've moved from the "open source technology" phase into "early beta consumer product," expect us to focus more of our energy on polishing the rough edges in our product and making sure transitioning to Flock (or upgrading from an older version) is smooth.
Don't expect us to stop experimenting. There's so much room for innovation in the browser space and we don't want to play it too safe. We fondly remember the days a decade or so again when every few months there was a new version of Mosaic or Netscape that enabled you to do exciting new things on the web. We want to bring that spirit and pace of innovation back.
Values
Flock is a venture capital-funded, for-profit venture. We're also a group of passionate people who believe in the power of openness, including the open source community. Here is our core belief: if we focus relentlessly on offering our users tools that let them take control over their online activities and if we engage in a conversation about how we can best improve our products, then we will build exciting products and do well as a company. Read more about our core values.
Company update
Along with working on the product, we've also built out the company over the past six months. Here are some of the highlights on that front:
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Other Systems & Languages
With the Flock beta being on the Digg Front Page, and lots of new people wondering what it's all about, maybe someone with some savvy should update the Wikipedia entry? (Mark this day as the day the Google Trends chart reveals a spike.)
Web 2.0 is so last week. I'm on Web 5.7 release 2.
Nice post -- seems your heads are in the right place. I do believe that this is something useful, for "regular people" (the MySpace crowd), and for right now. But I think that the direction the browser goes, or *should* go, is still being figured out. Maybe all that Flock purports to do should actually be done in a web page itself, via AJAX, XML, and the real open standards. Sure, Flock can eventually let me log in at my friend's computer and all my settings and themes and logged-in cookies are right there (credit me if I just gave you an idea :)), but I think some of the open models to address these types of things will work through the web (versus stored on Flock's servers).
Just some thoughts. I'll try the latest Flock (tried many months ago) as soon as my dying PC seems stable enough.
Nice Drupal-based theming of your blog. Drupal kicks.
http://dave.notik.com
Kind of like........Google Browser Sync?
Hi Dave,
Thanks for your comments. What we are trying to do is offer the richest client-side compliment to your online experience. So we support all the modern web technologies, and we let you interact in richer ways with web content. I think this release of Flock is showing some indications of what that means:
- type into the search box and results from your history, favorites and Yahoo search come to you (no more going to the search engine's site when you need to look something up)
- the browser lights up when you have news or pictures, and you can view those pictures and news stories much more quickly.
Give it a try and let us know what you think.
I just installed the new Flock Beta (0.7 on Windows) and the Setup Wizard does not connect to Flickr. Setting up my blog settings worked without problems - but every time I want to add Flickr to my photo services, I get an error page ("there was an error signing into Flickr) even before I can enter any user information.
Maybe this isn't the right place to post this problem... just wanted to point it out.
Bart, nice work and congrats on the beta launch. I've posted a review here.
Great browser! I liked it almost instantly however Flickr support isn't working for me which kind of ticked me off. All I get is that there was an error signing into Flickr. I had to create a PhotoBucket account to check out the image features which are quite decent.
Besides the Flickr bug, other major gripes include delicious links not showing up in the Favorites menu (but do show up in the favorites manager). Even if I add them to another group, new links added to delicious do not show up there.
Also integration with last.fm/pandora/odeo would be appreciated. Lets get the podcasting thingy going as well!
I think the next feature I would want is a profile export function. So that I can carry my profile around in one (password-proteced) file on my USB. Or PortableFlock of course ;P
Squirly, Hautam, Heiko,
Thanks for the feedback. We've gotten a couple of similar reports. What these users seem to have in common is that they are using an anti-malware app called Avas, which seems to be interfering with our access to Flickr. We are investigating this. Are you using that software as well?
I still don't see an answer to the question "what problem we were trying to solve that Firefox plus a set of extensions couldn't solve"
Any one care to explain?
If its just because they didn't want the user to have to install a list of extensions to get to where Flock is, surely they could have just got FF and bundled some extensions into it. Then both communities would have benefited.
As a FF user how do I benefit from Flock??
I still don't see an answer to the question "what problem we were trying to solve that Firefox plus a set of extensions couldn't solve"
Any one care to explain?
If its just because they didn't want the user to have to install a list of extensions to get to where Flock is, surely they could have just got FF and bundled some extensions into it. Then both communities would have benefited.
As a FF user how do I benefit from Flock??
Flock is really cool, I just setted it up and I really like it, but if you are all for OpenSource, then I don't understand why you coulnd't contribute theses changes to the Firefox codebase? If it's for a purely commercial reason, then what make you certain that firefox won't get all the changes you did, integrate them to Firefox and leave Flock behind... After all it's open source.
Regards,
Xavier.
Bart – congrats on the new version!
I think Flock users might enjoy listening to some tunes while browsing the Web 2.0 – so the latest FoxyTunes beta now supports Flock out of the box.
Gautam: the latest FoxyTunes integrates Pandora and Pandora/Last.fm mashup with Firefox, and now, Flock :)
Great work on Flock guys. While the leap from IE to Firefox seemed Revolutionary, I would consider the move to Flock more Evolutionary. It's great to see OSS devs taking more time to do innovative things and taking the ball with newer technologies and running.
I actually really like the way favorites work in Flock. I hated them at first but after a few hours of playing with del.icio.us and Shadows, the current implementations really does seem like a step in the right direction.
Yahoo! is also a leader in selling bloggers to chinese gov.
I'm a little worried flock just become yahoo browser and nothing more.
I would like to see one of my favourites extension included on it: cookiepie
we are making changes up and down the mozilla codebase and wanted full flexibility to do that. we also wanted control over providing our users with updates, security and otherwise. most importantly, we want to deliver a complete end to end experience, not just an add-on to another browser. just like seamonkey, camino, netscape 8 and any number of other mozilla-based browsers.
as a firefox user you benefit if flock becomes successful and gets more people to move from IE to a Mozilla-based browser, causing more web developers to make sure their sites work on all browsers.
"what problem we were trying to solve that Firefox plus a set of extensions couldn't solve" ?
How about, actually runs stable on OS X. Never had a version of FFox that feels like this. Talk about that! Doesn't happen like ever, to this experienced Mac / Safari user. Now I can stand to run something gecko. You are waay ahead of FFox on my two machines, and FFox ... is aggravating toast.
Thanks!
zo
james:
- as a firefox user, you don't directly benefit. but you do benefit indirectly if we become successful and get another wave of users to move from IE to a Mozilla-based browser, causing web developers to make sure their sites work on all browsers. you also benefit from new talent getting involved with mozilla code, doing new things with mozilla code, coming up with new feature concepts that firefox developers look at, etc.
- from an end user perspective, we want to offer a full solution, including single download, customer support, updates, etc. we don't want to be an add-on to some other browser. we're just like Seamonkey, Camino, Netscape and any number of other Mozilla-based browsers that way.
- from a developer perspective, we want greater flexibility and control to make changes throughout the code tree.
xavier:
- see above on why we don't want to be just an extension to Firefox
- we're packaging up all of our changes to Mozilla files to release them back to Mozilla under the triple license
- the rest of our code is available under the GPL and we're happy to sit down with Mozilla folks and discuss triple licensing any code that they would like to adopt into the Firefox code tree. so far we haven't received any such requests
- we are committed to getting more involved with the Mozilla community over the next few months, including by submitting more patches upstream and by looking to collaborate more closely on areas that are of interest to both Mozilla and Flock.
Alex:
- thanks for the kind words here and on the FoxyTunes page! i'll make sure it gets added to our extensions catalog. i just installed it and look forward to rebooting Flock so I can try it out.
Gruvsyco: thanks! I love our favorites, especially the way i can simply click on the star button and then use the search box to get to them, and i keep them in sync between my various machines.
anonymous: keep an eye on us. all of us here are pretty committed to keep pushing the envelope to push the user experience first, not the corporate interests of any of our partners.
Jon: we'll have a Submit An Extension feature up on our site over the next day or so, but I'll ask that we add Cookiepie in the mean time.
I'm not using Avas, though I have Windows Defender [beta] running and I occasionally use Spybot.
If would be lovely if you could integrate babelfish and online dictionaries a bit better. Is very useful when you chat to friend from other countries and don't always know how to say things =)
Any chance we will see support for www.fotolog.com ? It is quite a popular service, at least among brazilian people and we want those people to switch web browser =)
Great job guys ;)
just a friendly FYI some of the pages have the wrong path
i.e if you go to http://www.flock.com/about/
then you click Will Pate from the about page it goes to
http://www.flock.com/about/about/416
same thing here http://www.flock.com/forums/
see below.
Fixed ;)
This sucks
My First Encounter With The FLOCK Browser:
Hello everyone!
I have a thing about fast browsers you see! I was using Windows 98 for the longest while. Never bothered to upgrade to Windows XP. And because Microsoft Internet Explorer have been known to allow spyware, popups, and endless spam, I never used that one too often.
I have tried Mozilla's many browsers: Opera browsers, Netscape browser, Avant, Slim Browser, Enigma, and several others, but never have any browser shown the speed, reliability, spam free, compatibility with windows XP and Windows 98, like this Flock Browser.
Only recently I came across it while reading my e-mail, and tried it just to see how different it will be from all the others I've used. And I was hooked from the 'Get-Go.'
Flock has been able to satisfy me with speed, efficiency, spam and adware free pop-ups too, and it will be the only browser that I will be using from now on, until another one comes up, that could put this browser to shame (smile).
To the creators of this browser, I say keep improving on this browser, and I am sure that in time, Mozilla and the other ranking browsers will be history.
Peace!
Derryck.
Manhattan.
New York City.
Flock 0.7 is ok, but the real reason I gave it a try is to try the "blogging" features. I'm afraid I came off unhappy. That link is to a review I gave of the product, and it's not really a positive review.
This is not meant to be nasty. I think that there is a lot of promise in the product, and I know it not 1.0 yet. But there are "issues" that need to be addressed. The biggest one is that users aren't able to edit old posts using this tool. I posted once using Flock, found that there were problems (to be exact, a very large picture), and found that I needed the Blogger web interface to modify it. That really needs to be put in the next 0.3 versions of the product.
I've been using Flock since the first release, and damn it just keeps getting better. With 0.7, I think it's ready for primetime enough for me to reccommend it to my non-geek friends. I think the newspaper-esque RSS reader is the standout improvement in this version.
Blog Tool:
However, I agree with the poster above this post that the blog tool still needs work. I am writing all of my blog posts using Flock just to make sure I'm a good beta tester, but it mainly needs the ability to save/load/edit posts from your blog's server in the same way that Flock interacts with del.icio.us or Shadows, etc. In other words, using Wordpress.com as an example, when you save your entry, instead of saving it locally, it should submit Wordpress as "unpublished". That, and the ability to edit current posts will make me one happy blogger.
News:
Please, please, please, allow us to switch CSS themes for the RSS reader. I love the newspaper-esque two-column layout, but a little more customization would be great, and all that light blue is a little overkill.
Search:
A few releases back, "instant search" would search through your del.icio.us favorites, now it seems to search only your local favorites. That's a step backward.
But, all in all, man, by 1.0, Flock is going to be perfect!
WOW. Flock is amazing. Really great job guys. Love the blogging tool!
Kickass!
later,
JON.
scourist.com
I d'l Flock when the developer edition was out, but then decided it was no more than FF at that stage. From reviews and reading the comments here I see that it has evolved. I d'l the Beta again and gave it a try. Especially the Blog-thingy made me curious, but then I saw that you could only blog to existing blogs or their API's. I ahve my own blog (CMS), so that won't work. But all in all it is a lot like FF with the most favourite extensions incorporated into it. I sometimes use Opera as well and that browser has even more and better widgets en gadgets than both Flock and FF. Anyways, I agree that introducing and pushing this browser is good for making people make the step from IE to a Gecko-engine based browser. So 4 all U people @ Flock: Keep the good work coming!
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A few releases back, "instant search" would search through your del.icio.us favorites, now it seems to search only your local favorites. That's a step backward.
But, all in all, man, by 1.0, Flock is going to be perfect!
A few releases back, "instant search" would search through your del.icio.us favorites, now it seems to search only your local favorites. That's a step backward.
But, all in all, man, by 1.0, Flock is going to be perfect!
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i just came back to flock after a year & a half - i'm taking a break from opera! i like flock, but not firefox. there is something that is missing from this browser that would make it more customizable.
1) should be able to make your own shortcuts/hot keys
2) enable sounds i'm using a flyakite skin program & the sounds work in opera but not flock!!
3) that page status thing @ the bottom of the screen any chance of putting that in the address bar next to the rss icon it would be cool
just my 2cents - thanks for reading/responding
I love how much simpler it makes uploading photos to photobucket! I think that just saved my sanity!
Just a couple of ideas, though. I know lots of sites of have customised scrollbars, to match the site, and Flock just has a default scrollbar. I think it would be good if this wasn't the case.
Also, pages with links designated to open in another page opening in new windows instead of new tabs is slightly annoying. I know this is probably due to how these websites have been coded, rather than the Flock browser, but I thought it might be something to keep in mind.
hi,
although i dont really use the browser potion of flock, i use the photobucket mass upload quite a bit,
however with most of the photo's i take the ppl that want them dont want them on my account they want them on group acounts, i.e. an account for the regular sky diving group, the usual beach group, etc
one thing that would be useful would be the ability to log into more then one photobucket acount at a time, or at least give it the ability in that drop down box at the top to change acounts gor you, this may not be a problem for many ppl but in an average week i need to log into 15 or 20 different buckets and like 5 flickers to upload photos and changing the passwords just takes so long
as much as ive looked i cant find a way to this quickly
- D
Submitted by Herenya (not verified) on September 8, 2006 - 8:51pm.
I love how much simpler it makes uploading photos to photobucket! I think that just saved my sanity!
Just a couple of ideas, though. I know lots of sites of have customised scrollbars, to match the site, and Flock just has a default scrollbar. I think it would be good if this wasn't the case.
Also, pages with links designated to open in another page opening in new windows instead of new tabs is slightly annoying. I know this is probably due to how these websites have been coded, rather than the Flock browser, but I thought it might be something to keep in mind.
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i just came back to flock after a year & a half - i'm taking a break from opera! i like flock, but not firefox. there is something that is missing from this browser that would make it more customizable.
1) should be able to make your own shortcuts/hot keys
2) enable sounds i'm using a flyakite skin program & the sounds work in opera but not flock!!
3) that page status thing @ the bottom of the screen any chance of putting that in the address bar next to the rss icon it would be cool
just my 2cents - thanks for reading/responding
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love how much simpler it makes uploading photos to photobucket! I think that just saved my sanity!
Just a couple of ideas, though. I know lots of sites of have customised scrollbars, to match the site, and Flock just has a default scrollbar. I think it would be good if this wasn't the case.
Also, pages with links designated to open in another page opening in new windows instead of new tabs is slightly annoying. I know this is probably due to how these websites have been coded, rather than the Flock browser, but I thought it might be something to keep in mind.
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