Well the mysterious Flock web browser has finally released a developer preview. So far, I’m underimpressed. I was way more excited when I started using Opera a month ago.
So far (and remember, this is just a preview release), the only ways this browser is different than Firefox are its built in blogging tools, and del.icio.us distributed bookmarks. The blogging tools are well done, letting you post and edit blog entries through a simple interface. But did they really need release “another” browser to do that? The blogging interface would be a killer Firefox extension, but it’s just not that important a feature (for me at least). It seems to be trying to solve a problem that doesn’t really exist. I guess it is nice to edit your blog right in your browser, but there’s nothing really wrong about using a web-interface. Not every web-application needs to be converted into a stand-alone application 
And I miss my IImage Browser plugin so I can post my own photos that aren’t on Flickr so I don’t have to give my rights away.
Maybe I’m totally missing the point of this browser; I’m sure a lot of people will love these new features. But from my perspective, they are “features,” not a new browser 
Thanks for trying out Flock. It’s still very early and your criticisms are right on. Where we are now is very far from where we intend to end up. Basically, we’ve just gotten started and since we’re doing this open source, we wanted to get out our early work as soon as possible so that we can get this kind of feedback now rather than later!
Just to clarify about the Yahoo/Flickr thing… Yahoo’s ToS are actually much more in favor of you than the original Flickr terms. Yahoo errs on the side of making sure that you keep the rights to your photos whereas the Flickr terms were more along the lines of “you own your photos but we can do whatever we want with them!” At least that’s what my friend, Cal, who developed Flickr, tells me!
omg, I’ve become one of those people that complain about Preview releases in their blogs. Oh gawd, no! Noooo!
Seriously though, I appreciate you taking the time to drop a comment
I think we’ve all just heard so much hype about Flock (which is good for open-source!) that it’s hard to figure out why/when this browser is going to be so revolutionary.
There are some protections built into the Yahoo ToS:
Good luck getting Flickr/Yahoo to stay cool with integrating AdBlock though
Best of luck pushing Flock up to Release Candidate! I’ll definitely be following your progress, as I’m sure many people will be