I have been part of the small group of beta testers who were invited to download and test Flock 0.9 beta for last few weeks. Finally the carnival of 10-mails-per-hour mailing-list is quiet. The bugs are verified, listed and assigned for fix. We were adviced not to air the download link as it was under testing. But now I can invite the enthusiasts to visit the wiki that has the results of the testing phase. I would not like to forget mentioning that my name is listed in that page and will be in Flock Help Menu>”About Flock”>”Credits”>”Friends” of the final version of Flock 0.9. (off-track: I had a hard time explaining what “bragging right” is, to an Indian programmer last week. He should read this post to get an idea.)
Flock is technically a cousin of Firefox, because both runs on the Gecko engine, as does Camino, SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, and Netscape. Flock came out in the scene with many original ideas which firefox and other browser are planning to implement in the future. The main Idea is to integrate the social networking tools in the browser. Like blogging, uploading/downloading images to popular social networking sites right from the browser, intregrated news reader, saving web snippet etc. Amongst these, I like the photo-stream feature most. I can gaze at colorful pictures from flickr and photobucket, easily can filter the streams, and also upload from my harddrive by just drag n drop. I am also a fan of the news reader it has embeded in it. What I don’t like is yahoo as the default search engine. First thing I customized was setting google in it’s place.
Flock has enhanced all these features along with adding few new ones. The list of supported social sites are extended. Video streams from Youtube and Truveo are added to the media streams array. The look is prettier than any other browser, and a new home page feature is introduced that is called My World. It aggregates the favorite sites, feeds and media streams in the customizable homepage, reusing the redundant “home” button. There are three buttons (rss, media stream and search engine detector) in the address bar that get active depending on the meta data or content of any web page. They kept their creative flicks alive, to say the least. I am very excited about the release candidates now, with the requested features in place. Here is a sneak peek of 0.9 beta with the default home or my world page:
Flock n Roll…
Blogged with Flock
Tags: webbrowser, Flock, FF2, beta, release, testing, gecko, Flock 0.9
Thanks for testing, it was much appreciated! We’re excited too!
Flock on,
Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com
Would you recommend Flock 0.9 to a previous user that stopped using Flock when it was in the 0.7 version? I mean, I was in love with that browser but I just couldn’t stand its bugs and I am now using Opera. However, there are these sounds inside my head, screaming “Download 0.9, give it another chance!”. What should I do?
Thank you, Evan!
Thank you SebKom! Yes I definitely would recommend Flock. I cannot blog without it. And now it features many more extensions than the time you were onboard. As far as I can say, 0.9 beta version had some bugs, but final release would not.
I use Opera too. But Opera falls short on AJAX supprt, and extesibility, doesn’t it?
Yeah, you are right about Opera, but I am still afraid to download Flock. Any ideas about when the 1.0 version is coming out? I could stick to my Mac OS Safari until then…
Nope, 1.0 is not at the horizon yet. 0.7 was around for a long time, and now they are giving the impression that 0.9 is the big release for near future. So do not take 0.9 as a minor update before a 1.0 version. I think 0.9 is more different from 0.7 than how much FF 2.0 was different from FF 1.5. Give it a fair shot, you won’t be disappointed.
What I like most about Opera is, it speaks (text to speech feature). I wonder why no other browser does that. There should be some extension for FF and Flock that does that.
I installed Safari for windows on my Vista. Did not like it that much though. It felt more like IE7, and I never use that one either.
I visited your site, but could not read. Which country are you from? Forgive my linguistic ignorance, but doesn’t look like Russian! Or is it? Just a thought: You could keep an English “about” page.
Nope, 1.0 is not at the horizon yet. 0.7 was around for a long time, and now they are giving the impression that 0.9 is the big release for near future. So do not take 0.9 as a minor update before a 1.0 version.
That’s what I wanted to hear! I will download it tomorrow after I connect my MacBook Pro to the Internet. (hope the Mac version is fine too)
My favourite Opera feature is the “Speed Dial” page, it’s great!
I am from Greece and my blog is in Greek. You are right though,Greek and Russian have some similarities. I am moving to England to study, so I am planning to post some english articles soon. Thank you for your visit anyway!
Good luck! See you in UK then!