I tried the previous version of Flock, and I can like, I *did* love the integration. However it became one of those "too many distractions" situations, where I just found myself wasting even more time on various social networking (or just plain "timewaster"!) sites, ultimately leading to me uninstalling it and returning to Firefox. These days I feel like you can spend all day immersed in web 2.0, but for what? Granted, some sites and services are awesome, but others (Facebook!) are just timewasters for me. Half an hour goes by and you realise you could have been doing something far more worthwhile, heheh...

portobello_man

True. Flock is a silent killer-app. Couple of days of Flocking made a fan out of me. Ofcourse there were some unannounced crashes, but the long feature list is worth a look.

upnishad

Gotta have Reddit :(

Busybyeski

I'm definitely not one to act as Grammar Police, but this sentence-"...worried about leaving behind your most-loved extensions behind, fear now" kinda worried me.

skittlzncombos

lol I was gonna post the same thing about "fear now"

pnikkosis

@pnikkosis: a "freudian type," perhaps?

earth2marsh

Ahh... the dreaded 'now -> 'not' typo. I've done that one too many times myself. Amazing how much difference one letter can make.

jdoree

I keep Flock installed on my home bound laptop. It is a lot of fun and really integrates web 2.0 right into your browser. I think it would be great for teenagers! They seem to be on ALL of these social networks.

Flock is definitely worth installing and using at the right times, like when you want to go play and just surf. I really can't see using this for work related projects, (unless you blog or social network for a living).

anthonylitz

I keep updating Flock, even though I primarily use it as a free stand-alone blog client. The blending of Flickr and Worpress for the price of free sounds good to me.

I wish the Twitter client was better though, giving a list of recent tweets rather than just the most updated one for each friend.

Remixer96

Is this running the latest Gecko (1.9 I think)? If not, it's not worth it to me.

BluegrassGeek

The main advantage of Flock was rolled out in 1.1 with the integration of Gmail. With a single click you can email URLs with extreme ease.

With Firefox I email URLs via the Stumble toolbar, but I keep getting messages from my mom like, "WOW What a cool site! This Stumble thing seems really neat!" even though I didn't find the site through Stumble.

Flock sends you straight to your email client, and I enjoy that.

brad_frost

"I'm definitely not one to act as Grammar Police, but this sentence-"...worried about leaving behind your most-loved extensions behind, fear now" kinda worried me. "
@skittlzncombos: Whoops--that typo was my fault, not Jason's. All fixed. :)

Gina Trapani

@anthonylitz: You took the words out of my mouth. Except for the first phrase, as I don't even own a laptop.

HeadlessBourgeois

@Grammar Police: Really?! No one noticed that the article says "four popular extensions we've covered here at Lifehacker," but five are listed afterwards and shown in the accompanied image. To me that was much more glaring.

Great article by the way, Jason. I was skeptical of Flock when I first heard about it, but the browser definitely fits a niche. I prefer Firefox, but I appreciate all the work the Flock developers do.

Ninjeff

I love Flock-- it has become my dedicated screw-around browser. Now I have a separate client app for all the social media, photo browsing, and photo uploading I want to do. I also have plugged in a lot of other Firefox plugins into it-- just the ones that help me to screw around (like FireNES, FoxyTunes, PicLens, Shareaholic, and StumbleUpon).

This has allowed me to optimize my Firefox as a work browser and switch to Firefox3 without worrying about compatibility issues. If anything gets too weird with FF3, I can always switch over to Flock and access the same site.

With the increasing ubiquity of web-based apps, I think it's going to be more and more important to have separate browsers to handle separate tasks. Flock is a great supplement to almighty Firefox because it is specialized to do one thing really well.

farmerfresh

Great article, and it's great to see the variety of responses! A few replies and answers:

@upnishad: Thanks for the very kind words. :)

@Busybyeski: I will log your vote for Reddit integration.

@Remixer96: We're definitely looking at having multiple tweets from a single person in the sidebar in the future...I'll add your vote to the pile. For now, you can get that view in the Friend Activity Feed in MyWorld.

@anthonylitz: Glad to hear that you're enjoying Flock as a "play" browser! I'd highly recommend checking out our Web Clipboard feature, which can be super useful for the more "work" end of things.

@BluegrassGeek: We already have an alpha of Flock powered by Gecko 1.9 working, and we'll have a demo out in the next few weeks. You can get some more information in this blog post: [flock.com]

Flock'n'roll,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

EvanHamilton

Can someone compare/benchmark Flock's performance against latest FF RC?
That would be a truly important information.

If someone can describe their experience with Flocks using lots of tabs and leaving it open for a day or more too, it would be informative.

JrezIN

Since my job is moving into the blogging/social networking sphere, I keep the Flock shortcut on my desktop. I don't think I want to replace Firefox, though, because Flock *does* have too many distractions.

It's great for having almost all of your social sites and blogs in one place. I wish more were supported, or that it had some kind of generic site support (for smaller sites).

toutomoutochan

I'll give it a try :) Hope it isn't too distracting... :)

Reuel

Funny, I just downloaded Flock three days ago and it instantly became my favorite web browser!

komputerwiz

@EvanHamilton: Sweet! I'm looking forward to Flock 2, then. Unfortunately 1.1 was just too slow with the old Gecko engine on my laptop. Looking forward to the alpha.

BluegrassGeek

I really like flock but have not been able to use it as my primary browser. I have more memory problems with flock than firefox - I'm not sure if it's my setup or an extension and I have not tried 1.2 but in all previous versions I have had the same problem.

Has anyone tried Eco Flock - the green version?
[browser.flock.com]

kwbridge

I tried this about 6 months ago and it was good but some of my FF extensions didn't quite integrate (eg, Scrapbook) so I ended up wiping it off. Might give it another go some time.

da5id_nz

Flock is a decent browser and I just did a test run of Flock 1.2. Like I said, it's decent, but not much of an upgrade. It integrates well, but possibly just a bit too much for my taste. It all seems very busy to me and quite distracting. So, if you're looking for a distraction, Flock is for you. Also, performance is an issue for me as I've been spoiled by Firefox 3.0 RC 2 and its speed. Flock lags for me and it makes me impatient. But, I'll be interested to test the alpha as it upgrades to the new Gecko engine.

Alikia

Damn it.. I may as well give up on my GTD life changes.

cbiggins

The major problem that I found with Flock was Yahoo. I couldn't manage to get all the Yahoo out of it. I understand that they're making money from the default search provider, but let those users who care remove them. Despite changing the search agent in all the places that I could find, I couldn't get rid of the Yahooiness. Big thumbs-down from me.

Flamsmark

I use the portable version not to clog the system and I use it mostly to edit my wordpress stuff. It's not bad at all

pdfetc

@Gina Trapani: Thanks Gina!
@Ninjeff: Sharp eye, typo corrected. :)
@EvanHamilton: Thanks for the development feedback, Evan!

Jason Fitzpatrick

I don't think Flock is for me (I try to make my browsing experience more Spartan than distracting, because I have a horrible habit of compulsively checking sites if they're there in my view) but it seems like a pretty neat project, and I really appreciate the fact that Mozilla's open-source license allows such things.

mDuo13

I have been trying it for the last few days and I love it, with a few caveats --

- no last.fm???????? say it ain't so. this should be integrated post-haste
- re-installing add-ons is kind of a pain, but it allows for a clean install, which I dig.
- twitter & pownce are still semi-buggy, and I would love to be able to twitter/pownce right from the sidebar instead of jumping to the site.
- the feeds are a little confusing, but I'm getting the hang of it.

so far so good!

space race ace

I have flock for few months now. My firefox 2 i always have one complaint, it freezes many times and i need to wait as much as 5 mins to get it back normal. I always thought it could be one of the add-on issue though i thought it is not. Because my work PC, work laptop and home laptop - all three had same issue !. When firefox 3 came, installed it on many PCs (and also via opensuse 11), and with no plug-ins, even it also had freeze issue.

For a change, i started all my work stuffs on flock for 3+ weeks now, to my surprise it never once freezed !. (This post is also via flock 1.2).

mawin

I installed it and had to uninstall it after 10 minutes of playing around with it. For one thing, I can't log-in into 2 different Gmail accounts (I assume it's the same for the other services) and second, like someone already said, it's just too much. I can pretty much do whatever this one does in Firefox without the clutter and extra memory consumption.

the menace

I tried Flock. It was nice, but I can do the same things (and in some cases more)with FF extensions.

The big problem I have with software trying to integrate all the social networking sites is that they always falls short in selection and actual integration!

Facebook is starting to get a good handle on it now that you "import" info from a number of sites (digg, Yelp, blog feeds, StumbleUpon, etc.), but again, I am really looking something that can mix, match and cross-post all of my on-line activity.

snachodog

I use Flock on my home PC, since it can't go mobile and I try not to use social sites too much at work. The problem is that after a few days without a restart while using Digsby and Flock constantly really eats up resources. But I still love both apps.

audiophonik

What Firefox variant is Flock based on at the moment? I wouldn't want to give up the speed and stability increases of 3.0.

IraFantazmo

I really like Flock's built-in feed reader. Too bad they haven't figured out a way to either sync it with Google Reader or provide a way to sync Flock subscriptions across multiple computers. It's been a regular suggestion on their forums for almost two years.

Otherwise it's a decent idea and will will be even more decenter once they leave Firefox 2 behind, fear now.

quarterframer

I started using flock a few weeks back and as soon as I began getting comfortable with the built in blog editor and adding the add-ons I had in Firefox I can see myself slipping away from Firefox.

But I really like Flock because it is so similar to Firefox but it allows me to blog so much easier.

@portobello_man the web 2.0 features can be a distraction but I just find myself closing the people/media sidebar so I can do my "work". lol

fortyoneacres

You can download Portable Flock 1.2.1 englisch and german here:
[stadt-bremerhaven.de]

caschy