Flock 0.9 released!
Gecko-based web-browser Flock (Windows and Mac OS-binaries available) has been upgraded to version 0.9 earlier this week. 0.9 features even stronger integration with social web-services and blogging-tools than its predecessor - Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, del.icio.us are supported out of the box, as well as most hosted & self-hosted blogging-tools. besides these well-known qualities, the Flock-team added numerous improvements to the user-interface. like Phil Butler wrote in his review on R/WW, Flock-users accomplish many tasks by a smaller number of clicks than others:
- the three buttons next to the address-bar indicate a page containing media-streams for subscription (like a Flickr- or YouTube-feed), RSS-feeds and installable search-services.
- the star-button is probably the easiest way to add & tag links to your local or social (del.icio.us, Magnolia) bookmark storage, tagging included.
- the media-bar gives instant access to your friends media-streams. additional controls are used to blog or email media-items.
- furthermore: RSS-reader, drag&drop-enabled web-clipboard & instant blogging-tools including spellchecker.
I’m happily using Flock as my primary browser since about a year. this latest version seems to be a consequent improvement on the concept of integrating web-services with the browser. while most social features might be available for Firefox as installable extensions, Flock scores with its consistent & well-thought-out user-interface. the downside to this: the browser doesn’t offer any API for developers to snap in their web-services, so the decision which services are added is solely up to Flock. with 0.9, Flock even dropped support for bookmarking-service Shadows - probably not the first choice for social bookmarking anyway, but still.
if you have tried out this recent or a previous version of Flock yourself, I’ld love to hear you opinion in the comments!
note: unfortunately some more (Tidy, HTML-Validator) or less (Stylish) important Firefox-extensions won’t work with the new Flock version. like in previous versions its possible to override the version-constraints by manually editing the install.rdf-file in the corresponding extension-subdirectory.
Hey Michael,
Thanks for the write-up…it’s a very good look at the browser.
Regarding API: We agree with you, and we’re currently building an API to, as you said, allow “developers to snap in their web-services”. We’re starting with the Blog Editor and Feed Reader, but we intend to do this for all our major features. No ETA yet, but news will be posted on http://www.flock.com/blog
Regarding extensions: We’re going to be gradually contacting many extension developers to ask them to add Flock 0.9 to their .rdf.
Glad you’re enjoying Flock…things are only going to get more exciting as the year progresses!
Flock on,
Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com
thx for your reply, Evan, that’s really good news about the API! looking forward…
congratulations on release 0.9!
ps: is there any way to get hold of a flockstar-tshirt?
Hey Michael,
Shoot me an email to the address below with your address and shirt size and I will make it happen.
Flock’n'roll,
Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com
thx Evan!
oh, another tiny thing I love about Flock: when you STRG-click (”open in new tab”) a link, the new tab is opened right next to the active one (not in the far-out right, like previous versions or firefox do)
flock 0.9 is really impressive, the last time I tried was version 0.7 I think and 0.9 offers some huge improvements regarding stability and usability. still, what keeps me from using it as my primary browser are probably two simple things.
-) search keywords (they work if you import firefox bookmarks and have set them there)
-) keychain integration on mac os x (like camino does, which is my primary browser)
(I got my flock shirt two years if I remember correctly, from chris messina
Christian, didn’t know you’re a flockstar
guess we should both sport our flock-shirts at the next barcamp vienna!
not sure what you’re referring to with “search keywords” though…?
I was referring to those shortcuts (search keyword) to search bookmarklets in firefox. E.g. you bookmark a search result, assign a shortcut (keyword) and instead of the search term you put in %s. It allows you to perform searches by typing the shortcut followed by the search term into the address bar.
Right-clicking any search bar in firefox gives you the option to save this search to your bookmarks as search bookmarklet.
It’s a quite powerful feature which I use most of the time…
@Michael: this was a design choice, and many people enjoy it. Still, it might be nice to have this as an option. I will look into that.
@Christian: You can find out how to reactivate search keywords at http://www.flock.com/faq/show/30#q_11752
Flock’n'roll,
Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com