So, here I am again, playing with Flock.
I do like some of the browser — it’s a very slick look, and goes quite well with my Blackbox theme.
However, there are things about Flock that do bother me.
First, let’s look at my current layout. Ever since Firefox^WFirebird^WPhoenix was released, I had a tendency to use small themes, with small, but very clean icons. Part of my decision is influenced by the layout you see up there. I don’t need 13 or 14 icons doing the exact same thing my keyboard can do, but I’m fairly attached to having a [back], [reload], [forward] icon, simply because they have a menu attached to them. Said menu allows me to jump back or forward X number of pages in a given tab, which is something I have yet to be able to duplicate with the keyboard.
This is fine, when you’re using a microtheme in Firefox, such as Flyson’s Whitehart, or Alfred Kayser’s Little* series of themes, because each of those has small buttons that do little to no distortion of the menu row. However, with a theme like Flock 2.0, it’s too thick to properly accomodate things, thus stretching the menu row in an unwanted way. It’s now at least twice as thick as it needs to be.
I also like my address bar next to my button cluster, because it gives me that much more vertical space to work with. The vertical space bonus gives me the freedom to keep my Bookmarks bar open, without eating as much of my precious viewport space as it would in the default configuration.
Call me spoiled, but I’ve grown very accustomed to the simplicity of Whitehart. It has clean, easy to recognize icons, a compact, but clean appearance, and best of all, it gives me enough space to function. As you can see in the above picture, I’ve done away with the ‘Go’ menu — I have yet to see a logical use for that menu, and I like the extra few pixels of space it gives me as a result. I’m sure I can do the same for Flock, with ChromEdit, or digging out the directory and editing files directly.
When I decided to get down and dirty, and go under Flock’s hood, like I have done countless times for K-Meleon and Firefox, I noticed that Flock, too, suffers from the same exact issues that the aforementioned browsers all suffered from: The JAR files have terrible compression. It looks like they were all packed in a mode that only stores files, which is not bad, except that if you wanted to try putting Flock on a USB Key drive, it takes up a bit of extra space. My prior experience with K-Meleon gave me an understanding of what would be safe for compression and in general, how far to go.
I also noticed that a lot of files suffer from Geckoitis, that is, the act of being stuffed with at least 1 kilobyte of licensing information that the general public will never see. When I was working on making K-Meleon portable, I had remarked that it would have been more logical to have a single file in the /chrome directory that states something on the order of:
These files are covered by the Mozilla Public License (available as MPL.txt): file1, file2, file3…
These files are covered by the GNU GPL (available as COPYING): fileA, fileB, fileC…
And perhaps a header line in each file that reminds the person whether it’s MPL or GPL, or ISCMMFPL (don’t ask), rather than including that much redundant text in each file. In my K-Meleon works, I actually trimmed much of that cruft from the files with some help — one user wrote me a Perl script that actually looked for the text, and would chomp it out of the file, given an identical set of lines to search for.
Perhaps it may be against the licensing agreement, but if I’m not redistributing it, and am only using it for personal reasons (ie: fitting it on a device that is constrained for space), I don’t really see the harm in it.
Then again, that’s just silly old me.
On Flock’s external appearance again, there are other quirks that bother me. I’m used to hitting ctrl+T (new tab), and having the new tab come to focus immediately, then hitting ctrl-L or alt+D, then typing in my location and striking enter to go somewhere. It’s actually pretty fast for a guy like myself to do that. However, that last enter stroke sends me nowhere. Running Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8b5) Gecko/20051103 Flock/0.4.11 Firefox/1.0+, I just get no satisfaction.
But that, I suspect, will be ironed out.
As for the ‘favorites’ system, I’m not very keen on it.
I used to use delicious, but it wasn’t something I really enjoyed. I found Simpy, and found it to be much better for me, in regards to importing my old bookmarks, and being able to sort through them much more easily than I could in Firefox. The additional features that make Simpy so nice to me allow me to sort things from my current bookmarks file, which I had let grow in a rather sloppy manner, and remove things that are dead, or just unneeded. Combined with the fact that I never could get a delicious extension to even work in Firefox, I was never compelled to use it then. Now, if I could use Simpy with Flock, I would be far more interested. The reason is, I could finally exchange bookmarks with Firefox, and even export for Opera, K-Meleon, o IE usage. That would make it very nice to me.
I also tried the blogging client for Flock. I really wasn’t impressed with it at all. I guess that having used Semagic for a long time before leaving LiveJournal did predjudice me against most clients. Granted, Semagic had its own class of irritations that I could do without, but it was easy enough to use. Perhaps it was the lack of that WYSIWYG stuff by default that did it for me. Perhaps it had a few extras that made things tolerable, like built-in ‘friends’ (blogroll would be nice) management.
Flock’s nice, but it’s not quite for me, I guess is the point of this seminar.
I’ll give it some time to mature, and hopefully some kind souls will help me in addressing the things that bother me.
Enjoy.
wtf?!