From Firefox to Flock... and back!

Flock is "The" Social Web Browser. Take Mozilla's Firefox, insert native del.icio.us, gmail, blogger and flickr support (to name just a few) and you'll have something close to what Flock has to offer. It is like a Firefox special edition packed full of extensions but, because they are tightly integrated and tested with the code, you'll get a stable and really powerful browser for all your internet social needs. Kind of.

Flock is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. I'm a Linux user so my experience is related to this OS only. I've started using Firefox (in Windows still) over three years ago and about six months ago I took Flock for a test drive. I liked it. And I made the switch.
Why? Here's why:
- gmail support: Flock checks for new messages and lights up an icon when they arrive
- blog editor: Flock allows you to post and edit your blog (or blogs), be it in blogger or any other major site, directly from a browser window without the need to visit each site
- photo uploader: the same as above but with Flickr and the like
- online bookmarking support: Flock allows you to integrate your del.icio.us or Magnolia account and post your bookmarks to the browser as well as your online accounts simultaneously from a browser window
- feed and media reader and aggregator: you can add the feeds from your favorite blogs, organize them in folders and, like with gmail above, an icon is lit up whenever there's something new on your feeds; besides blogs you can also add media feeds from youtube and flickr and check them in the same fashion I described
- it looks good, flock has a really good looking interface

There is also something that is useless for me but for users of the social networking aspect of these sites (and once again, many more sites), they can have all their friends and buddys easily accessible on a side bar as well as messages, updates, etc, etc...

But today I'm back on Firefox. And Flock will be put aside. (for now?)
There are several reasons for switching back, here are some:
The Linux integration: I use PCLinuxOS, as far as I can tell, not even one of the major Linux distributions provide packages for installing Flock from the repositories and, on the other end, all that you can get from Flock's site is a compressed file with the program files, not .deb or .rpm installers and definitely not any easily accessible instructions on how to proceed to install it, create shortcuts, etc. I'm not a complete newbie on Linux, but I'm used to having some sort of guidance either from the distribution maintainers or from the software developers.
Maybe related to the above, Flock never really worked as good as firefox on my system, especially sites with Java applets were a problem. When Mozilla announced Firefox 3, Flock quickly warned "Fear not! Flock 2 with Firefox 3 stuff is on the works!", I decided to download the Flock 2 Beta 2 in hopes that it would solve some of the issues I faced because Firefox 3 was working really great on my system, better that Firefox 2 if I recall correctly.
Just then I realized: How the hell am I going to make Flock 2 use my profile, with my bookmarks, my passwords, yada yada yada? I tried uncompressing the contents of the tar.gz into the current Flock folder, it didn't work. I then tried putting the flock 2 files on a different folder and strangely it worked. I guess that's because I originally put Flock on ~/.flock . Anyway, now everything was working ok, but Java applets were still a problem and I don't know why www.meebo.com crashed Flock. That was a new and annoying problem. A few days ago the Gmail and the feed handlers got stuck in time and they aren't updating anymore. I don't know why either. I decided to abandon Flock 2 (beta software is beta software, use at own risk!) and get back to Flock 1.2.4, I figured it wouldn't be a problem, I still had that folder and didn't touch it since. My mistake, now Flock 1.2.4 refuses to run... and I'm not in the mood to loose more time with it.
I like to have some level of control over the interface and the inner workings of the browser I use. I guess I got spoiled by the flexibility of Firefox. The Flock people are proud of their product, they invested time and money making it perform well and making it look good and they aren't that keen on you messing with their work of art. I use the search bar a lot and the default size is not enough so I would like to have it a little longer at the expense of a smaller address bar. I can do that with Firefox, but in Flock not even hacks on userChrome.css worked. I also have a lot of search engines on the search bar and Flock doesn't allow me to set the order in which they appear or deleting the default ones, Firefox does.
Still related to the search bar, while Google is the default search engine for Firefox, Flock is endorsed by Yahoo. I'm ok with that. A free software house has got to make a living, so I even tried getting used to Yahoo but eventually I gave up and decided that Google was the way to go back to. Switching the default on the search bar was easy but, as you may know, you can use Firefox's address bar to access the "I'm feeling lucky" search from Google. I looked up Flock's site for help, found more people asking for it and Flock's answer was "Sorry, not possible at the moment.". But it was. A few posts later on the same thread a user came up with a solution, you just had to change a value in a line in the about:config page. Apparently that's a fix for Firefox and, obviously, it works on Flock. Once again I got the impression they were trying to hold back information because they don't want you messing with their product, that's ok by me, I accept that. But Flock must keep in mind that Firefox got people used to doing (pretty much) whatever the hell they wanted with their browser. I know that Flock aims at a specific type of user but (at least for me) details matter and attitude matters.

But really, Flock is a great piece of software, much more than just Firefox with a nifty skin and a bunch of extensions held together with duct tape. It really is great but I guess I'll wait until there's a more conscious effort to integrate Flock into the Linux world for a more streamlined experience, maybe then I'll take it for another test drive. If you're a Mac or Windows user and have accounts on the sites I mentioned on this post, you should really give it a try.