Flock Takes Another Stab at Browser Market
Flock, the wanna-be browser for Web 2.0, is taking another hack at making its mark with a new public version - 0.7. So there's nothing terribly new from the last version, which was met with ridicule because it was an alpha that really wasn't ready for prime time. But I'll give Flock this much: they're certainly ambitious because Flock is still trying to be all things to all people. As standard features, it comes with a blogging tool, a bookmarking tool (del.ico.ius), an RSS reader and a photo uploader. One of the challenges of trying to be multi-faceted is it's tough to a do a good job at everything. The blogging tool, for example, is pretty basic - and it doesn't support Blogware. That said, I like this version of Flock a lot more the last one. There is nothing wrong with trying to push the envelope - and Flock is trying hard to do something different. So is there enough to unseat Firefox as the main rival to Internet Explorer, or even establish itself along with Opera as a viable number three in the browser market? Maybe. Flock has another chance to create some buzz and attract enough users to establish a browser foothold. It doesn't hurt that Michael Arrington is waving the Flock pom-poms. Flock has apparently raised $10-million in venture capital from Shasta Ventures. Not sure how it justifies this kind of investment given the business model hinges on revenue from a Google search box but I guess the folks in Silicon Valley are either smart than us or have a lot of money sloshing around. Anyway, it's worth giving Flock another try but not sure its a Firefox-killer. You can download Flock here.
Update: TechBeat offers up a review on the new Flock, while Thomas Hawk gives it a huge thumbs up.
June 14th, 2006 at 7:34 am
I switched to flock about 4 months ago - and agree that it was a wee bit on the buggy side. That being said, upgrades and patches were pushed out regularly, and the newest releases of the past few days (as the flockers were gearing for the official beta launch) were fast and addressed many of the oddities.
PS - i bet they will have a fix for Blogware soon, they managed to make the blog editor work with Squarespace.
For work, i use flock instead of firefox. Flock's ability deal with IE specific web apps is uncanny, and blows the doors off firefox. Many a time i would have had to flip between firefox and IE to be able to work with a web page, bu somehow Flock knows what to do…
cheers,
jules