Flock Releases Version 2 – Good But Will Hardly Make Us Switch Anyway


The social browser Flock is definitely the browser that is most appealing to early adopters of all the new technologies available on the web. From the very beginning the team behind the Mozilla-based browser was focused on offering the browser as the ultimate access point to as many web services as possible - thus making the browser very appealing to anyone using more than one social media service or social network.

Tonight the team has launched the new version of the browser out of beta - Flock 2.0 - which is supposed to further enhance the browsing experience for Flock users. The most important thing in this release is that the code of the Flock browser has been upgraded to match that of Firefox 3. Of course this will not be noticed by the browser users but this will certainly enhance the performance - something the users will be happy about anyway.

Other major additions in the new Flock release are:

Support of media RSS feeds

These are very similar to usual text-based RSS feeds but they syndicate rich content - photos or videos - from the supporting websites. Flock automatically detects such feeds when they are available and offers you to subscribe so that you could get the new pohotos and videos immediately when they are published.


Support for MySpace

Flock has been integrated with 23 social networks and services like Facebook or Twitter or Digg allowing the browser users to interact with their accounts on the networks right from the browser sidebar (this is what the browser is named “social” for). Now MySpace has been added for Flock users to message their MySpace friends and comment on their profiles without going to the pages. This has been a much-requested feature for the social browser, of course.



Flock themes

Lack of opportunities to customize the browser was one of the concerns of potential Flock users who refrained from switching from Firefox. This is where the new themes page comes into play for users to be able to choose exactly how they want to see their browser look and feel. Two new themes are introduced today with promises to add many more in the near future.

But unfortunately I tend to doubt that this new release will actually change the situation with the browser’s market share (the browser was downloaded 6 million times which is impressive until you remember over 500 million downloads for Firefox. I believe that the reason here is that Flock offers a dramatically different browsing experience than what we are accustomed to with Firefox - it is not better or worse, it is actually different.

I believe that everything that is different takes some time to explain people how they will be more comfortable once they get used to the new actions required to browse the web. I think Allen Stern was certainly right when he compared Flock to a new couch that requires some time to find your sweet spot but once you find it, life is great again. But for now web users seem to be too lazy to switch and use the browser long enough to get accustomed to it simply because of the learning curve that is obviously here.

To download Flock browser 2.0 Click here
Source:profy.com