It’s been nearly eight months since Silicon Valley based Flock released a developer version of its Firefox based browser. This evening they are releasing their first public beta version, available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines, at Flock.com. I’ve been running the most recent developer release on my Mac for the last few weeks and it is now my browser of choice.
I interviewed the Flock founders - Bart Decrem, Geoffrey Arone and Anthony Young - as well as investor Jason Pressman from Shasta Ventures, last night. The podcast of the discussion is up on TalkCrunch, here.
Flock is a Mozilla based browser (see also Songbird, another application built on the Mozilla code base). They’ve built additional features to the core Firefox code base that make the browsing experience more seamless, including photo integration with Flickr or photobucket, social bookmarking integration with Del.icio.us or Shadows, a blogging tool, enhanced search and a RSS reader.
Photos
Photos stored in either Flickr or Photobucket are integrated directly into the browser experience, scrolled horizontally just above the browser window. Photos can be uploaded to these accounts by dragging them into the browser. Or, photos can be added to any web page that accepts html (a comment area on a blog, for example) by dragging the photo directly into the web page. This is the single most compelling reason (for me) that I’ve switched to using Flock - to bring my Flickr photos to the desktop.
Photobucket and Flickr are currently supported. More photo services will be integrated over time (I’ve suggested that CNET’s AllYouCanUpload be supported as well, for example).
Bookmarking
Flock also has close integration with Del.icio.us and Shadows social bookmarking accounts. Clicking on the star button next to the address bar bookmarks the current page, and metadata such as tags can also be added. More bookmarking sites will be supported over time.
Blogging, Search, RSS
Flock has an integrated blogging tool, with integrated tagging, that works with most major blogging platforms. Users can switch between preview and html views. Search via the top right drop down (same location as Firefox) is set to Yahoo as a default, and an be changed to Google, Technorati, Wink, etc. (no support for MSN or Live.com search though). Beginning to type in a search query brings up a pop up box that shows recent bookmarked sites, visited sites and search results from the default search engine.
The integrated RSS reader is excellent (image above to left). Any visited web page with a feed shows the orange feed icon in the address bar. Clicking on it shows a preview of the feed. Another click and you are subscribed. Within the reader feeds can be read individually, or in “river of news” fashion.
Flock will make the majority of their revenue from the search bar, just as Firefox does. They have a revenue share agreement with search providers for searches completed through the browser. The low end estimates I’ve heard suggest that Firefox generates at least $2-3 per year per user. Flock is also going to charge service providers to integrate directly into the browser, and plans on launching co-branded browsers with partners to increase distribution. Given their close relationship with Yahoo (search, del.icio.us and flickr integration), I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Yahoo version of Flock distributed sometime this year.
Flock has also raised a new round of financing led by Shasta Ventures, rumored to be in the $10 million range. Previous investors included Bessemer Venture Partners and Catamount Ventures.
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technically, these are no longer generic browsers but browser-based tools and applications… fat client or expanded toolbars perhaps?
For the last decade there has been basically no innovation in browsers… FINALLY we have a browser that understands that the use cases behind the web have evolved over the last decade. Flock makes it ten times easier for me to interact with the web… I love the photo upload capabilities and the simple bookmarking integration.
About time too! Looking forward to trying this out
seemless -> seamless
Looks great, though there’s no public beta. My only concern would be how they kept up to date with new releases of the core build from Mozilla. All this just after I got hooked on the new Google browser sync extension for my bookmarks…
Currently the site isn’t offering a download
Look for it in an hour or two.
Bernie (and Jay), the public beta will be up in an hour or so. The product is ready, it’s the site we are wrapping up! I hope you enjoy it once you have a chance to download. Please let us know what you think.
Flock is awesome, last year I said I’d never switch from Firefox. So much for that! I don’t know how I’d go without the photo browser!
You can download Flock from the developer page, which is publicly available.
I’m excited to see how far Flock has come, owing much to Bryan Bell’s excellent design work. Flock still has a ways to go before realizing the original vision, but this milestone build is a very good downpayment. It’s still not stable enough to replace Camino for me, but it’s making consistent progress (disclosure, I used to work for Flock and left in March to consult).
I’ve been using the Developer Preview of Flock since February as my everyday browser. It’s absolutely amazing. Go ahead and call me a Flock fanboy. del.icio.us integration alone makes it worth using.
I still remember how annoyed I was back when IE was taking over from Netscape, but over time I got used to it and actually got to like it.
It’s interesting that the Flock folks have picked this up again and came up with something that really looks fresh and original. I’ve tried out v0.5 and v0.7 in parallel with IE, and I feel myself going to the Flock browser more and more. The initial main attraction of Flock for me was its prettier toolbar and fresh feel, but with v0.7 I downloaded just this weekend I really like the new features that popped up whenever I was on flickr.com. I’m quite the Flickr addict, so this is pretty exciting.
Looks like this might be a big one. I’ll be following it closely.
flock is my default browser for some time and i can’t go back to firefox…
everything works just perfect and it’s beautiful.
Excellent! I am really pleased to see a beta. Stability has been a big issue for me when I tried the alphas. That and speed of course. Social browsing is a great idea I might make Flock my default.
digg story here: http://digg.com/technology/Flo.....ublic_Beta
I’ll be writing a review of it soon, focusing mainly on it’s Web 2.0 integration.
I’m going to have to take a pass on this browser. Firefox is just perfect and loads too fast for me to give it up.
I’m curious about the second round of funding. Either they got decent terms on this money or they have a HIGH burn rate. Weren’t they somewhere around a $6M round last time?
God……..
Big old 404 hitting Flock.com…oopsies….
I get thsi:
Not Found
The requested URL / was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) Server at flock.com Port 80
Not a big confidence builder. I tried flock a while ago and it seemed to get in my way, but it could just be a bit of a learning curve. I’ll give it another try since this one is more aimed toward the “public”.
We just launched our new site with the downloads, we still have one server which is syncing with all the new content (will be working soon).
- the flock team
Looking forward to testing this. I am interested in the blog and rss part of it.
-Guna
“Very soon you will be able to add your favorite extensions and we’ll convert them on the fly for you.”
Get back to me when that’s working. For now Flock could not replace Firefox for me–and I expect for 99.9% of Firefox users–since while it imports favorites and some other stuff from FF during installation, it does NOT bring across extensions.
For $16 million bucks they might have had this working by now. Glad it ain’t my dough. D’oh!
Wow, that’s pretty impressive compared to the last beta I tried. The snippet thing, rss reader, and the flickr support is really smooth–the rss reader is probably one of the best in-browser implementations I’ve seen. It won’t be my default browser though as it inherits annoying behaviors from firefox that break the usual Mac conventions, but it’ll be very welcome on my PC for casual browsing.
Kevin Burton: the numbers you quoted were incorrect.
Cheers,
Will Pate
Community Ambassador, Flock
I’m really curious to try it out again.. I took it for a spin early on and really wasn’t all that impressed. A fun concept, a great concept even. Just not something my girlfriend would be able to figure out.
It was (and may still be) a web2.0 browser for web2.0 people, and frankly.. I donno, it’s just not there.. Here’s to hoping they’ve made progress though
finally a mayor step from flock. i guess it will be hard to meet everyones preference when it comes to the third party services used … i mean who will intergrate those million services we will want to be in there : stumbleupon, plazes, webride, buzznet, 23hq, zooomr, youtube, vimeo (slowly fading out to white)
wow, this release is killer. i love the flickr integration, love it. i dont like the lack of plugins or extensions (3 months playing with it) but thats a matter of time. its my pc browser for sure, still too weird on my mac…
I have been using Flock for almost an year now (right from their first release of the developer version) & i have found it to be really good. Now, this is the only browser i use. With the help of Flock extensions i am able to get almost all the functionalities i would get in Firefox. For IE only pages, i am now using the IE Tab Extension and since then i have never looked at any other browser.
Flock kinda grows on you & once you get used to it you generally don’t want to look back. Also, even though it is the Beta take my word that it would be very stable. I had been using this all this time & never really got around to get it to crash (although a couple of times it hung if i visited Flash intensive sites on earlier versions).
I’ve been using Flock since 0.5 and I love it. All the Web 2.0 intergration is great. The new iteration of the program is even better and I really recommend that everybody try it out. I saw this article in the RSS reader in Flock and now I’m typing my comment out on it. Fun stuff.
Wish this might intiate a new era of Browser 2.0 , coooooooooool way to make the browser more user-friendly. But doubts still remain, like,
Based on Mozilla code- How frequently would I get updated with patches/security fixes?
Extensions - How good is this from the Extensions + FireFox Browser?
Many many more……………….
Regards,
Rajesh
Take in mind it is not using the bookmarking as in firefox (may be they do now) pretty anoying for me and my 100 bookmarks i use daily. but if you want a fix for that.
http://www.gijs.com/?p=126
The blog is dutch but the explanation is english.
No social network/MySpace integration? They’re missing a big boat there
Thanks for the Songbird mention Mike.
Songbird is a media player built on the Mozilla platform.
Mozilla has extracted a platform called “XUL Runner” from Firefox so companies like Songbird can build cross-platform products that have a built-in web browser.
Flock is built directly on top of Firefox (I think) while Songbird is built on XUL Runner. Some people complain that Flock is built on Firefox when it “should” be built on XUL Runner. I don’t understand that though. If it makes sense to biuld on Firefox, build on Firefox.
I guess I still don’t get it. How is this better than Firefox with a few extensions?
Personally the RSS reader is OK but I prefer many others (for example I like to see a third pane with the whole html page (both SAGE and Wiz RSS do this for firefox). Yes I realize I could use Wiz with Flock.
The blog feature doesnt recognize my Wordpress blog.
etc.
I am glad that many people like this but it just seems like Firefox with 4 or 5 nice extensions.
BTW - what’s the revenue model?
@ Steve: I’ve tested with a few wordpress deployments it works fine and way better than performancing extension for FF. As for the revenue model RTA:
- Branded browsers
- Payments from search engines
I love this new release. I couldn’t care less about the social features.
But the skin is so much better than Firefox’s default and it loads faster and neater than firefox.
It’s like a Mozilla-based Opera!!!
I like the latest release but is somewhat disappointed that microformat extensibility is still not integrated into the browser. For a social browser, you would think that the ability to view microformat content without having to install 3rd party extension (Flocktails) makes so much sense.
I am working on two projects that use microformat schema extensively and i would like to think that it’s the next best thing on the web when it comes to giving semantical meaning to the web content. But that’s just me, and maybe Tantek :P.
But overall, I’m just impressed with the flock team effort. They took quite some flaks from the blogsphere when they released their dev version and to be able to stick with something they believe for so long and come out with a public beta is something commendable.
scratch my last comment about MySpace. I see that they have some cool tools for posting photos there:
http://www.flock.com/faq/show/28#q_1039
Is it me or is their site down? I get this error:
“Lost connection to MySQL server during query”
I’d really love to give tihs a try.
hrm, hadn’t used to often enough before to realize I was using the developer version. thought I’d drop a not to other Ubuntu users to say that it works just fine under 6.+ Dapper. This one does seem more refined that the last & it’s quite fast. nice work flock devs
Tried it out (I’d tried the alpha a while back) and they’ve definitely improved but unfortunately, its too blog-author oriented for me (being that I have no blog of my own).
If I blogged regularly, I might use this browser but since I don’t, I’ll stick to Firefox.
Thanks for posting this, I have downloaded this and within 15 minutes I am hooked. This product has some interesting tools and enforces my ideas about the browser as the os.
Like
I like the integrated Photo and Blog editor. I have been using Performancing which seems a bit ahead of Flocks blogging tool but I the nice thing about the fact that this product was built on Firefox is that I can load performancing if I want.
Dislike
The top window which displays the photos loaded into Flickr is not expandable. Additionally, neither is the “Upload” window. It would be nice to change those. For me the Upload window into Flickr was “almost” unusable.
Cool product! I am in!
Lynx -> Netscape -> IE -> Opera, Safari -> Firefox -> Flock??
Oh boy, web site publishers and designers are going to bear with the standards of yet another browser, again…
hi!
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