It’s New Browser Time
A while back, I asked What’s Up With Mac Browsers. At that point, I was kind of disappointed with FireFox because it slowed my computer down to a crawl if I kept it open for too long. So I tried Camino, but that had a massively annoying issue and it only lasted a month as my default browser. In the end, I returned to Safari and that’s what I’ve been using for the past two months.
But this week, Flock went into public beta. Since one of Flock’s community ambassadors was gracious enough to leave a comment on my last post about the browser, I figured that I owed it to their team of developers to give them another try.
For those who don’t know, Flock is trying to do something different in the browser space. Rather than focusing solely on page rendering and speed issues, they’re trying to develop a browser that makes it easier for users to contribute to the social facets of the World Wide Web. For example, it integrates very smoothly with Flickr and del.icio.us (as well as some other photo sharing and social bookmarking sites), and it comes with a built-in blog editor. It also has a built in RSS reader (which I haven’t started playing with just yet). Basically, it takes basic browser functionality and tries to add more value to it.
The question, however, is how well does the whole thing work?
I’m still testing it out, so I can’t give you too much information just yet, but I’ll tell you one thing that has chapped my ass already. It’s the way it does bookmarks. I’m not talking about its integration with del.icio.us. No, I’m talking about the way it doesn’t allow “folders” within its bookmark collections.
In Safari, there is a bookmark bar that has your list of bookmarks. You can add a folder to that bar so that, when you click on it, you get a drop down menu of all the links in the folder. You can even nest folders if, like me, you like spending time building a healthy file heirarchy.
For example, in the image below, you can see that I have a bookmark folder called “Writing Tools.”
When I click on this, I get a list of a bunch of writing tools that I frequently use. But you can also see that I have three folders nested within this folder. One is for “Specific Resources,” the second is for “General Resources,” and the last is for “Writer Magazines.” Without having to click again, I can work my way down through my heirarchy of folders and find the specific link I want. Then I just click on the link (in this case, “The Indexed Phobia List” — hey, you never know when you’re gonna want to look up the phobia name for people who are afraid of scientific terminology, which, if you’re interested, is Hellenologophobia), and bam, I’m done.
In Flock, however, you’re not allowed to have nested folders in your bookmark toolbar. Instead, it gives you a drop down list of all your folders. Looking at the image at right, you’ll see that this drop-down list isn’t nested at all, which means that finding the exact folder you’re looking for is as simple as finding Osama Bin Laden, especially if you imported all your bookmarks from Safari (as opposed to creating them all new in Flock). Sure, I could reorganize all of my bookmarks, but I’ve been collecting and organizing these things for several years now, and a complete redo is, to put it mildly, just a tad annoying.
What Flock should maybe do is re-design the Safari importer so that the user has the opportunity to select exactly which folders to import and which ones to leave alone. They may even want to consider notifying the user that they’re about to lose all their nested folder capabilities, and that it might make sense for them to play around with their Safari bookmarks before they import them, especially since Flocks “Favorites Manager” isn’t nearly as well implemented as Safari’s.
As for now, that’s really the only pain-in-the-ass thing that I have found about Flock. Granted, it’s only been a couple of hours, but everything else seems to running nice and smooth. I’ll be sure to update y’all if I decide to stop using it for whatever reason, but for now, I’m gonna stick with the Flock.