Problem is, the audience they’re aiming for are the exact same people that are still stuck using Explorer despite every single alternative being superior. The people nerdy enough to have heard of Flock will probably feel personally insulted by it holding their hands and trying to redirect them places.

Delicious: The integration is unecessary, since you can have way more powerful tools with the right extensions in Firefox already. No need to switch just because of that.

Flickr: I don’t have flickr.. why? i have webspace to put my pics on. most bloggers do.

Shelf: Nice feature to put things aside, but it encourage bloggers to do hotlinking. Drag images from a site for integratation in a blogpost is a no-go to me.

General: Is there any way to bookmark without “staring” a page, which publishes the bookmark to delicious? Also.. where are the sidebars at all? The favorites are fullscreen and the usability is terrible.

Conclusion: This is FF1.5 with some built in extensions, which are also no match compared to equivalent existing in Firefox.

Nice try tho.. i’ll give it a second chance once they go for final.

And that makes you an expert on it eh? I can see why your blog is so popular :P

Thanks,
Shuai King

I used FF for some time, but now I’ve switched to Flock full-time and I just like it.

The hype doesn’t matter and, for that matter, neither does the backlash.

the del.ico.us bookmark feature is a waste of time (IMHO).

interface is cool…my favorite thing is the ability to reorder your tabs. I’ve been wanting a tabbed browser to do this for a long time!

it’s still in beta…so I guess we’ll see if it catches on…my money’s on “no”, but you never know.

Flock will never make it as a real software but it doesn’t matter… It will never steal a single user to IE7, just a few to Firefox.

Flock is there just to show to the average IE user that the next battle will be among IE7 and a bunch of other elitist small/medium browsers without any chance. So that the impression won’t be IE against one big opponent.

It’s all politics. At MS they learned that having only one rival as Netscape, kept their enemy alive more than it would normally have.
My theory.

At any rate, if the problem they’re trying to solve is that tracking down interesting extensions and getting them installed is hard/tedious, then what they really should be building is a plugin synchronizer… something that you can install once on a browser anywhere, and then it will automatically grab the most recent version of every extension in your “profile”. (Which, of course, would be cool, since there’s then the tremendous opportunity to recommend extensions based on existing selections…)

Are they trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist? Maybe, but then again everyone thought Google was doing that too. Remember how search seemed as if it was good enough and no one could figure out the business model?

Here’s what I think the bet of the company is:

1. That more and more people are putting content up on the web today and that trend will continue. This includes blog posts, pictures, bookmarks etc.
2. That people will want and need a better way to manage and accomplish these tasks as time goes on and that Flock will be it.

I think that this is a good bet, at the very least it’s not a stupid bet.

Yes – the product may be early
Yes – there will be challenges for the team to get adoption.
Yes – Absolutely the web experience needs to evolve and I’m glad someone is working on this.

Chris