Living with Flock.

The pros and cons of early adoption.
by AC - permalink

So I've been using Flock as my go-to browser for about two weeks now, and I've run into a few... issues. No deal-killers, but some annoyances. Plug-in support has been iffy. As in Firefox, you will occasionally come across a page that requires a missing plug-in, and the built-in plug-in finding wizard will invariably fail to help you. I was an early adopter of Firefox, so I've managed to manually install most or all of the plug-ins I need over the years (there are less than a dozen), but I was having trouble with Flock. I came across an entry in Flock's online help that suggested finding Firefox's nested plug-ins folder and simply copying its contents into Flock's equivalent directory. This worked for some plug-ins, but not for all of them -- notably, the Windows Media Player 11 plug-in, which is pretty prevalent. For sites using WMP for embedded video, I've had to go back to Firefox.

That was an easy one, though. A few days ago I fired up Flock and all my RSS feeds were gone. I poked around and couldn't find them anywhere. I chalked it up to a growing pains bug and tried to resubscribe to my feeds, but Flock thought every link I fed it was "invalid XML." It also failed to display the little RSS icon in the address bar when going to any site with a feed, which suggested that the browser had completely lost the ability to recognize a valid feed. I couldn't find a solution in the online help (though I didn't look very hard) and decided to completely uninstall the program -- including profile data -- and reinstall it. That fixed the issue, although another bug showed up when Flock's installer failed to prompt me to import any data from Firefox. Now, after install, the import wizard still fails to recognize Firefox as a valid import source.

Later I found this help article which might have helped me with the vanishing feed problem, but not with issue subscribing to new ones, and this article that explains how one Mozilla-based app can't import data from another when the latter is running during the former's installation. I'm not going to blame the Flock developers for this one, because I did have Firefox running when I reinstalled Flock, and I did know better from experiences installing other Mozilla-based browsers (Netscape, K-Meleon, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Browser, etc.). Unfortunately, there's no real workaround.

Other than these problems, I've been pretty happy with Flock. There are some nit-picks, like having the option of opening a link in a background or foreground tab, which I get in Firefox with the Tab Mix Plus extension and in Opera by default. There are also the little details changed for the better in Firefox 2 which haven't been incorporated into the Firefox 1.5-based Flock, although one of the most noticable, built-in spell-checking, is included. Also, as far as I can tell there are no alternative themes available for Flock anywhere. Granted the default theme is no nice that it's being ported to virtually every other browser, but how about some reciprocation?

Overall, though, my revised opinion of Flock has to remain positive. It's still my default browser, with Firefox 2 as backup and IE7 on stand-by. I feel a little guilty about it, because Avant Browser, a former favorite of mine, and Opera, which I've always liked for no reason I can nail down, can't even make an appearance in my start menu's recent apps list anymore. But that's how it works I guess. Build a better browser, and we'll use it. I hope Flock's user base continues to grow, because not only will it get better, all the others will have to keep pace.

Blogged with Flock