I’m just playing with the Flock developer preview, and have exactly 5 minutes to look at it and knock out some thoughts.

1. It’s firefox with extras.
2. Bookmarks are gone; hello integration with online bookmarks. This is a good thing. It will promote their use to the masses and help foster an online meritocracy. (Or merely lead people sheeplike to the same wastes-of-time, and further perpetuate the sites that are already popular… the name makes sense now).
3. The ability to tag a page quickly and easily is going to be one of those features that I never knew I was missing, like browser tabs.
4. The History viewer is a bit nicer, but – uh oh – where has the ability to search the history gone?
5. Hey, there’s a blog editor too; that’ll keep the press happy.

Aside: If these parts are available as firefox extensions then they’ll most likely see more development than if Flock remains an island project; some of the parts have a lot of potential.

First impression

The del.icio.us bookmark integratation may be useful, but one of the main faults is that it’s still too firefoxy. There’s too much of Netscape’s legacy here: for example, why is there still a “Go” menu, and in fact, why so many other useless menu options still around?

Having an editor for blogs is potentially useful “for the masses” but for anyone who runs their own site with hand-crafted plugins, there are likely to be things that can’t be tweaked, so the usefulness drops off for the power user. So, for the hardcore hackers, the extended tools may be too blunt, but for the rookie, they may be too much to take in.

My 5 Minute Verdict

Flock needs to decide on it’s audience and focus it’s UI accordingly. It needs more usability work in order to make everything simpler, but it has some promising features.