Flock, the New Browser on the Block

^tamago^ writes to tell us BusinessWeek Online is reporting that a new browser is stepping into the arena. This new competitor, Flock, hopes to change the face of web browsing by turning their's into the swiss army knife of browsers. From the article: "Flock's browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn't satisfied passively browsing media online. Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online"

Re:Based off of Konqueror?

[nazh]

Wired says it is based on firefox;http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,128 2,68823,00.html?tw=rss.TOP [wired.com]

Screams? More like burning letters 100' tall.

[khasim]

Go and click through on some of those extension links.

They ARE FireFox extensions. You can install them in FireFox today!

Which makes me wonder why they aren't making their "new features" as extensions to FireFox rather than claiming to be building a whole new browser.

Re:No Invite

[AKAImBatman]

Indeed. Actually, the idea of keeping it secret doesn't bug me. That works well enough for Google. But the key word is "secret". You don't go blaring to the press on an underground beta.

Flock will be Open Source

[burtonator]

... also... did you know that Flock will be Open Source [feedblog.org] ?

Kevin

An Insult to Ruby on Rails...

[ant_slayer]

Ok, so am I the only one who tried to sign up for a download? No, of course I didn't use my *real* email address. No one's that dumb (my apologies if you have suddenly become a member of the set of dumb people). I guess my "exclusive invite code" of "giveittomenow" just *happened* to be a valid code (I'm such a l33t h4x0r, eh?).

But then, shock of all horrors, it's the most defaultiest rails login app I've ever seen in production! Seems to me they could at least have changed some colors or added a logo (oh, right, they don't have a logo yet... or is it that blue rorschach?)

-Ant Slayer-

Re:I wonder what MBA thought this one up.

[CyricZ]

According to this Wired article [wired.com], it is being developed by Bart Decrem, who they state is a member of the Mozilla Foundation.

Re:Based off of Konqueror?

[nazh]

I hate to reply to myself, but this screen shot of flock 0.1 confirms that it is based on firefox. http://flickr.com/photos/87617152@N00/31057629 [flickr.com]
Taken from the flock blog http://www.decrem.com/bart/2005/08/done-flock-01-2 / [decrem.com]

Re:more competition should be a good thing, I hope

[Fordiman]

Well, if it's written in Java, chances are that its extensions are too.

However, I have two problems with having a browser written in java:
1) It won't run on my 500Mhz Dell without making the internet feel like I'm slogging through stiff pudding. (No, Firefox doesn't; I'm running a highly tweaked Linux 2.6/Debian)
2) I don't want a JVM running every damn time I want to check my gMail.
3) Can you imagine a JVM interpreting javascript?? We're talking slow.

Here's a hint, guys:
Discover the beauty of gcc+(wxWindows|GTK+) and build accordingly.

Re:Officially affiliated with the Mozilla Foundati

[advid]

Not from what I've read. The founder, Bart Decrem [decrem.com], was in charge of marketing and business activities for the Mozilla Foundation. (So sayeth his bio [decrem.com], anyway.) But it seems like they're taking advantage of all the work that went into making it easier to rebrand FireFox earlier this year, and just making a totally new and unrelated browser that happens to share the same core technologies.

In researching that last paragraph, I came across this blog entry by one of the developers [wordpress.com], which has a nice summary of press/blogger reactions to Flock.

Gee Sounds Exactly Like imeem.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Why aren't more people using imeem? It's been around for almost a year quietly doing all of this.

I beta tested Flock.

[IO ERROR]

Not only did I beta test it, I wrote a review [ioerror.us] of it about two months ago.

In short, it's:

• Based on Firefox.
• A blogging and social networking tool.
• Not going to steal your personal data.

Read the review for more.

Results using the HTML Validator Firefox extension

[carlmenezes]

HTML Validation Result
----------------------
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.mspx [microsoft.com]

line 2 column 1 - Warning: missing declaration
line 8 column 356 - Warning: ' is not approved by W3C
line 10 column 2403 - Warning: missing before

line 10 column 2435 - Warning: inserting implicit
line 10 column 2547 - Warning: discarding unexpected
line 12 column 46 - Error: is not recognized!
line 12 column 46 - Warning: discarding unexpected
line 14 column 980 - Warning: discarding unexpected
line 24 column 6844 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 6997 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7004 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7166 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7173 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7423 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7574 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7581 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7729 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 7736 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 24 column 8210 - Warning: is not approved by W3C
line 6 column 115 - Warning: inserting "type" attribute
line 8 column 381 - Warning: inserting "type" attribute
line 8 column 449 - Warning: inserting "type" attribute
line 10 column 58 - Warning: proprietary attribute "topmargin"
line 10 column 58 - Warning: proprietary attribute "leftmargin"
line 10 column 58 - Warning: proprietary attribute "marginwidth"
line 10 column 58 - Warning: proprietary attribute "marginheight"
line 10 column 289 - Warning: proprietary attribute "height"
line 10 column 938 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 938 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 1230 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 1230 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 1423 - Warning: proprietary attribute "height"
line 10 column 1570 - Warning: attribute "bgcolor" had invalid value "FFFFFF" and has been replaced
line 10 column 1612 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 1612 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 2554 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 2554 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 3339 - Warning: proprietary attribute "height"
line 10 column 3460 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 3460 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 3761 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 3761 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 4066 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 4066 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 4363 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 4363 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 4672 - Warning:

proprietary attribute "url"
line 10 column 4818 - Warning:

proprietary attribute "menu"
line 10 column 5121 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 5121 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 5258 - Warning:

proprietary attribute "menu"
line 10 column 5561 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 5561 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 5706 - Warning:

proprietary attribute "menu"
line 10 column 6009 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 6009 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 6144 - Warning:

proprietary attribute "menu"
line 10 column 6447 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 column 6447 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkid"
line 10 column 6578 - Warning:

proprietary attribute "menu"
line 10 column 6881 - Warning: proprietary attribute "linkarea"
line 10 c

Re:Screams? More like burning letters 100' tall.

[foolswisdom]

As much as possibly we will make things technically extensions, and we already are in conversation with Mozilla in how we can best work with them -- we are well connected with the excellent people at Mozilla ;-) We are building a browser in the general sense. We will be delivering a complete browser while keeping up with Firefox's security and technology. Delivering a complete browser makes a lot of sense to me, because we can control the underlying Firefox source code that we are interacting with while perpetually improving and extending the experience of Flock -- a moving base for a large development effort is not fun ;-). Maybe as XUL Runner matures our distribution method will change. We will be open source -- we are still dotting the 'I's with the lawyers. As legally required by the MPL the people that have already received the Flock browser do have access to our MPL modified files. If you really want the code, I can get it to you ;-) Once the lawyers are done, all of our code will be open source. Firefox is too fantastic of a development platform for us not to do everything possible not to hurt it or its community. We feel that the Flock browser will complement the Firefox browser. We are targetting a much, much smaller (but growing) group of users -- you know who you are ;-) And because we are not trying to be the browser that meets everyone's needs -- which Firefox does an amazing job at -- we can try some different things ;-)

Re:more competition should be a good thing, I hope

[foolswisdom]

Yes, Flock is being developed on and for MSWin, MacOS, and Linux. A slight majority of the developers do their work primarily on Linux. It is not "written in java". I think you have us confused with a SourceForge project. The Flock browser is directly based on Firefox.

Playing nice with other people and technologies is very important to us!