Back to Firefox: sorry, Flock - I tried
So last night, I downloaded and installed the latest 2.0.0.14 release of Firefox (I’m just not ready for beta3 yet). I’ve been a Flock supporter for about two years now, but it was just time to switch. It wasn’t necessarily anything that Flock did that made me go back to Firefox. It was what it didn’t do that forced the uninstall. Or at least, what it claimed to do, but didn’t do so well. Man, that makes it sound more complicated than it actually is.
In essence, part of the appeal of Flock is its social networking/media integration. Only, it didn’t manage it well. The Twitter section showed all of your friends, in order of who has tweeted most recently, only displaying the last available tweet for each person. Anyone who has used Twitter extensively knows just how horrendously anti-Twitter this setup is. I tried using the function for two days, and lost significant portions of the conversations taking place. FAIL.
The Facebook section was marginally better, but all it ever showed me was what each friend of mine had as their most recent status. It would also apparently notify you when they posted photos, but evidently none of my Facebook friends ever posted any. That’s not a “fail” for Flock by any means, but it’s yet another question as to why I should be using the browser.
The Flickr integration was slick, I liked the media bar and the photo uploading feature. The only problem is that I have next to no Flickr friends/contacts, so once again, it just wasn’t a feature built for me.
Don’t even get me started on the built-in RSS feed reader. Nothing compares to Google Reader. Sorry, people - just stop trying.
When it comes down to it, I was using Flock as a fancy Firefox with some of my favorite extensions already built in. That was it. It didn’t necessarily make any of my online/social life easier to maintain or more convenient to access. It was simply there, and I decided there was little incentive for me to continue using it.
I’m sure there are a lot of people that get excellent use out of a tool like Flock. It’s unfortunate that I finally realized I wasn’t one of them.
Filed under: firefox, flock, internet, social network, software
Yup, I hated Flock, good riddens.
Although I think Flock is slick, I don’t use it much. Best built-in feature IMO? That if you open a link in a new tab, that tab opens next to the existing tab that you are in.
The lamest feature has to be the RSS reader.. it’s not even as good as the Safari RSS reader that it is modeled after. Lose. The Twitter support comes in as a close second.
Alternatively, I think Digsby does almost all of this right.. the Twitter support isn’t quite as nice as, say, Twhirl, but it’s way better than Flock. And of course, it is a superlative IM client. I actually have a review of it here.