October 21st, 2005
Flock Browser Disappoints
By Mark Evans
Contributing Writer, RealTech News
I was finally able to play with Flock - the hot, new browser that is going to rock the browser market by offering “Web 2.0″ tools such as the ability to blog, share bookmarks and photos, and easily get RSS feeds. With so much hype, it would be easy to fall short of expectations but even after giving it the benefit of the doubt (a beta-like 0.5 version is just being released), Flock still manages to disappoint because it appears to be little more than a new skin on top of Mozilla source code. While some of the features are cool and more are apparently on the way, there is nothing that can’t be easily replicated by IE, Firefox, Opera and Netscape. I find it difficult to understand why there is so much buzz about Flock; why Flock CEO Bart Decrem believes it will have 100 million users in five years; and how it attracted $2 million in venture capital.
We Say: There is no reason to abandon IE, Firefox or Opera for Flock. If you’re curious about Flock, wait until at least version 1.0 before trying it out.
For more analysis, click here.
JTintle says:
I tried it out today for a short time, and I would have to agree, that it disappoints. Just about everything Flock does can be done in FireFox with the right extensions. So I will look at flock again if/when they release 1.0
October 21st, 2005 at 9:51 am
Kai says:
Jtintle, thats sort of the thing. Their market might be people who want tools offered by extensions, but don’t know how to use extensions. I think its innovative, but not a firefox killer…yet.
-kai
October 21st, 2005 at 10:07 am
Rob Hyndman says:
Agreed. I expected tighter integration and slicker browsing chops.
October 21st, 2005 at 11:23 am
Eric says:
I was invited, as well. And on the mailing list, I asked “what exactly are we doing here?” and was admonished.
It’s a firefox engine, with a tabbed IE interface, virtually all the preferences taken out.. and the delicious and blogger extensions built in.
Why on earth would you want delicious built in? What kind of a person actually USES delicious anyway? it’s .. awful.
October 21st, 2005 at 11:51 am
Dave Barnes says:
I also tried it out today for a short time. Very disappointing. Plan to wait until 1.0 to play with it again.
October 22nd, 2005 at 9:17 am
Error500 says:
Flock, el navegador para la web 2.0
http://www.paulstamatiou.com/2005/10/21/flock-under-those-feathers/
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1875204,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594
http://www.realtechnews.com/posts/1996
October 23rd, 2005 at 3:56 am
buzzer says:
firefox will struggle to fight the market when IE7 will be out. Why create such a pointless clone now, so to have for that day something else on the market to weaken firefox?
Conspiracy theory: behind flock, there’s Microsoft.
October 23rd, 2005 at 6:28 am
Lockergnome's Tech News Watch says:
Flock Browser Disappoints
Mark Evans of RealTech News writes: I was finally able to play with Flock - the hot, new browser that is going to rock the browser market by offering “Web 2.0″ tools such as the ability to blog, share bookmarks and photos, and easily get RSS feeds….
October 25th, 2005 at 6:31 pm
Hiddenson says:
So far, Flocker is just a mock version of Firefox. I agree with other posters that the target audience may well be people who don’t even know what extensions are and can’t tune their browsers themselves.
Stick with Firefox or Opera. But please, move away from IE
October 26th, 2005 at 1:27 am
上海翻译公司 says:
Firefox is a good weapon to beat Microsoft.
August 14th, 2007 at 6:05 pm