Flock 1.1 beta will add web Email, Picasa and more to your web browser

Filed under: Internet, E-mail, Social Software, Beta

Flock 1.1 beta will add web Email, Picasa and more to your web browser

by Brad Linder Jan 17th 2008

Social web browser Flock is planning to launch 3 major new features in about two weeks. Like its predecessors, Flock 1.1 beta is built on Firefox code but it has a ton of features that make it easier to keep in touch with your social networking services like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube.

Flock 1.1 adds:

Web Mail Integration - Not only can you easily check your Gmail and Yahoo! Mail with the click of a button in the newest version of Flock, but you can also share web pages, images, and articles just by clicking the email icon in the URL bar.
Friend Activity - Flock now aggregates your friends' activity from across all supported social networking services and displays it in chronological order. This could be the easiest way ever to find out which friends have updated their profiles, sent out tweets, or uploaded new media or blog posts.
Picasa Integration - Flock has added support for Picasa Web Albums, allowing you to upload images from Flock, share images via email, or browse through images using the media bar. You can also send images to friends just by dragging an image from your media bar to a Facebook, Twitter, or other contact in the People Sidebar.

We got a chance to play with an early version of Flock 1.1 and we were pretty impressed with how well the new social features are integrated into the web browser. The Friend Activity screen and web mail checker don't check for updates quite as often as we'd like, but hopefully the Flock team will provide users with the ability to customize how frequently the browser checks for new email and friend activity in the future.

Flock is available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new beta version should be out before the end of January.

Tags: facebook, firefox, flock, friend-activity, picasa, twitter

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Blog Jones said 8:35PM on 1-17-2008

Man, I *really* want to like Flock. But its stupid insistence on using Yahoo in the drop-down search box keeps driving me off.

If it would let me switch to the default behavior from Firefox, I would probably actually use Flock. But that one stupid behavior is a deal-breaker for me.

celia said 8:46PM on 3-18-2008

how do u download flock i need help downloading it?

Evan Hamilton said 11:40PM on 1-17-2008

Hey Blog Jones,

You can switch Flock's search to any engine you'd like (literally...Flock will detect any available search engines on a webpage). You just go to search preferences and change your default search provider.

Flock on,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

varun said 12:31PM on 1-18-2008

Evan - that's simply not true. I've used flock for ages, and even after manually configuring the search engine in the about:config window, any search preference changes are reverted back to Yahoo. I definitely can't change the search setting when it comes to mistyping something in the URL bar. I don't know where you get your information, but this flatly wrong and I can show you this via screenshots.

Worst of all, though, is the restore last tab functionality. Accidentally closing a tab means that basically you're on your own getting the tab back. Flock's reopening mechanism seems to be written as "find random tab opened in the past 30 days and open it".

For all these reasons, in addition to the general sluggishness on a brand new Core 2 Duo machine, I gave up on Flock and went back to Firefox. I want to like Flock, but fix the problems!

Bruce said 9:12AM on 1-18-2008

Any chance of a smaller memory footprint? I have been using the Firefox 3 beta, and it is fast!

Greg Andrew said 2:33PM on 1-19-2008

Evan - But is there any way change the source of the Live Results to a site other than the the six search engines (Amazon, ebay, craigslist, favorites, yahoo, and technorati) listed in the options?

PS - By the way, yes, performance and crashing are definitely issues, as its tendency for its memory usage to go up to 650,000. It also would be nice if someday Flock was more modular, so you could not load parts of it that you don't use. I realize that that's not a reasonable expectation for now - it's just that Flock is destined to always have a heavier footprint than Firefox because it's more feature rich, and thus it would be nice for their to be a way for users to use less of a footprint if they don't use significant features.

Evan Hamilton said 11:51AM on 1-21-2008

Hey varun,

I don't know how to convince you that it's true...I have my search set to Google right now and it hasn't changed no matter how many times I restart. Perhaps you are not following the path correctly:
-Open Search Preferences
-Change your Default Search Engine to the one you want
-Close the dialog

It is slightly more work to change the search in the URL bar, and we have the instructions available on our FAQ. Here's the link: http://flock.com/faq/show/30#q_11642

As for restoring last tab, I have never experience or heard of any problems regarding this. Please shoot me an email to evan at flock dot com and we'll see if we can't diagnose this issue you're running into.

Let me know if you have any further problems changing the search engine!

@Bruce: We're always working to improve Flock's performance...in fact, we've made a number of performance enhancements in the last 6 months. If you haven't tried Flock lately, give it a look and see how it runs. Of course, we will be updating our code to reflect the Firefox3 codebase as soon as it is completed and released, so I'm sure you will experience some of those Firefox3 performance boosts in Flock soon.

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

varun said 10:10AM on 1-21-2008

Evan - following your instructions (identical to what I did previously) results in Google appearing in the box until I close all the windows. Restarting Flock returns the situation to where it was, with a useless Yahoo box. Perhaps Flock is attempting to write its config file to a blocked location under Vista? Make sure Flock is not identifying itself as a Designed for Vista program and attempting to write to a locked location. I have also tried your approach to change the search results for a typo. As with the above, the change remains until the next Flock restart.

The missing restore tabs can be reproduced pretty reliably as follows:
1. Change the preference to restore tabs and windows on restart.
2. Open a bunch of tabs.
3. Close one.
4. Open another, completely unrelated tab.
5. Quit Flock entirely.
6. Restart Flock.
7. Use Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + T to restore a tab. About once in ten times, Flock will get restore the tab you closed in step 3. Nine out of ten, you will get a random tab that you opened (often the tab in 4).

I strongly suspect this has to do with Flock's behaviour of attempting to group related tabs together. Certainly this behaviour does not exhibit in Firefox, even the Minefield trunk builds.

Evan Hamilton said 12:00PM on 1-21-2008

Hey varun,

Thanks for the detailed steps! I will pass these on to the team and see what they can reproduce. Would you be ok with them contacting you if they need more info? If so, shoot me an email at evan at flock dot com.

Flock on,

Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Blog Jones said 5:50PM on 1-24-2008

I can get it to search Google in the search box, but the "live preview" doesn't have the same Google search results in the drop-down that appears as you type.

The search options dialog has options for Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo, and a couple of others, but not for Google, which is what I really want.

I just want it to behave like Firefox here: I type in the first few letters of a search phrase, hit the down arrow a couple of times to get to the one I want, and hit enter. When I hit enter, it should take me to the Google search page for that term.

Basically it looks like I want the drop-down to be an autocomplete, which is how Firefox works, while Flock wants the drop-down to replace the search page.

BobCFC said 12:41PM on 2-02-2008

I can change the default search engine to Google perfectly well.

Using 32bit build on Ubuntu 64bit Linux

liviu said 3:48PM on 3-09-2008

buna

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