Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Flock”
Personal Browser Usage Update
Ever since I last wrote about Opera and Chrome, some things have changed about my browsing habits. On Windows, I’ve gone from always using Flock to always using Opera. I just found out that Flock finally released version 2.0 because I wanted to check up on my facts before looking like a dork on my own blog. So I haven’t used version 2.0 and that doesn’t figure into what I’m going to say here.
Flock keeps getting more and more useful!
At this rate, I’ll never be able to kick the Flock habit. Ever since, as I blogged before, they fixed their problem with stuttering YouTube videos, I’ve been able to use Flock for my main Windows browser day-in and day-out. Now they’ve added even more features! First of all, I think it’s neat that they’ve published an online video (via YouTube) that appears on the “you’ve updated” page. This is much more exciting than simply reading a list of what’s new and even shows you how to activate it.
A Quickie
Back when I reviewed an earlier version of Flock, one of my complaints was that it was impossible to watch Youtube because the video was always stuttering. Well, the Flock programmers have fixed that bug and it’s now definitely usable to watch Youtube videos. I’ll admit that I only watch, perhaps, 1 a month, but to most people that was a deal-killer before.
My History with Browsers Part 2: Opera
My excitement over Flock has faded a bit. It’s a bit bloated. I understand, because of the software involved in Flock’s features, why Flickr is so slow. However, Flickr is one of the sites I visit more often than any other, so I need it to go fast. Right now I have to load up Firefox whenever I want to do anything in Flickr for more than just a couple of minutes. And watching videos (such as on youtube or vimeo) is next to impossible on Flock. It keeps skipping and stuttering. Also, Facebook’s recent changes to the pokes page make Flock’s Facebook features less attractive to me. 111
My History with Browsers Part 1: A History Lesson of Sorts
At first I used Internet Explorer because we had a free trial of MSN. Then we switched to MCI, who used Netscape (although you could also use IE) and I mostly used Netscape. I think this was around Netscape 4 or 5. I really liked Netscape A LOT and used it almost to the exclusivity of Internet Explorer. Of course, those were the exciting days when every few months Netscape and Internet Explorer would release a new version. As I’ve commented in previous posts, whether or not Firefox ever gains a dominant share (and the same with Linux vs Windows), its mere presence will necessitate innovation from Microsoft. You may have noticed that IE stayed at version 6 for a very long time until Firefox started getting really popular. But I digress. Netscape had all the best plugins and I thought it was the ultimate in the Web experiences. I coded all of my websites with Netscape in mind.
Social Web Part 2: Mugshot
Mugshot is the website that continues to surprise me the more I use it. At first it was just a website with an unusual purple theme. Then it was the very frustrating site with the purple theme. Now it just may be one of the most interesting and underrated sites of the year.
In case you haven’t clicked on the link yet, Mugshot is a social web aggregator. You sign up to Mugshot and then let it know about all of the social networks you’re a part of such as Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, delicious, Picasa, digg and Reddit. Additionally, you add in some feeds from Amazon.com, last.fm, and Netflix. Finally, if you enter your blog address it tracks new posts. It then uses this to track all of these in one convenient place. The thinking is that you and your friends all sign up for Mugshot and then you have one-stop-shopping to find out everything that’s up with your friends.
How Flock has completely changed my browsing habits
Flock has completely changed how I interact with the so-called Social Web. In my case, that means Facebook and Flickr. Ever since I first started using Flock and received the help I needed to get the blogging to work, I’ve been using it every day. In fact, that only thing that has kept me from having it be my only/default browser is that it’s extremely slow in Flickr when loading pages. Also, in any pages with videos (whether from Youtube or Vimeo) there is a video and audio stutter that renders the video unwatchable. But that’s the only real negative I’ve been able to find with Flock.
Flock Blogging now works for me!
Many many thanks to Flock engineers Erwan Loisant, Mike Dosik, and Patricia Bacon. They took time with me over the past few days to get my problem debugged and now categories worked. Here are the details in case you find yourself in my situation.
First of all, once they told me that it worked on Wordpress blogs in general, I was starting to think that it might be a problem on my end. It turns out that it was a problem on my end! After some debugging, Erwan found out that Flock was getting back the message that the pulling of the categories was requiring more than the alloted 8 MB for PHP memory. So I went in and increased that and now it works!
Further Review of Flock 0.9
So I’m using Flock daily now for my web browsing to see how I like it. Since I don’t usually go to Facebook on my own, it’s nice to see the notifications within Flock. Thus, I’ve been more responsive to my Facebook private messages, a good thing since my second-cousin recently caught up with me on Facebook. So I’m liking the Facebook integration even more than I thought I would since I’m not a Facebook-heavy person.
Flock 0.9
(just so you know, you should be able to click on most of the screenshots to see them more clearly)
Earlier this year, I took a look at flock. It didn’t impress me. In fact, I found it so useless to my browsing habits that I didn’t even bother to review it. I neglected to mention last time that Flock is built upon the same Gecko backend as Firefox. This is, as I have mentioned before, one of the best things about free and open source licenses. Firefox is a great technology, but it’s meant to be the every-man’s browser. This is expressed by Firefox’s own team and it’s why they have the plugin architecture. They feel that the Mozilla Suite became extremely bloated as it had a web browser, IRC client, email, and (I think) calendar built into it. It was a bit intimidating for first time users and took up quite a bit of RAM. Also, from a programmer’s perspective, it’s a lot harder to maintain something so complex. So, for Firefox they went for just developing a solid browser. Anything missing could be implemented via plugins.
test post with flock 0.9
This is a test post for a blog post I’m writing about flock 0.9. It should appear in the next 30 minutes or so after I finish up. This is bold, underlined, and italics.
- This is bulleted
- and this is numbered
also, it should be tagged “flock”
Blogged with Flock
Tags: flock
Flock - A New Type of Browser
I’m writing this from flock, a new web browser which comes with a lot of built-in utitlities for the most popular web technologies including flickr and blogging. I’m writing this post from within flock’s blog utility. I’m not sure yet if this is a worthy feature or just a gimmick. I intend to try flock out for a few days and see.
It’s just like the old days of Netscape vs Internet Explorer when more and more technologies kept emerging. After IE won the battle things were stagnant until Firefox came around with their tabbed browsing and so forth. We’ll see how this turns out!