Flocked #2
By glazou on Tuesday 25 October 2005, 21:32 - Mozilla - Permalink
Let's say this is follow-up to my first message about Flock a while ago (note to self: remember, dell laptop keyboard and beer don't live well together...). I received, like many others, Flock's wake-up call last week. I did not test it as soon as I got the message for two reasons : first, I was in SF, busy; second, too many people wrote about it that week, and the buzz was so _web_bubble_2_0_ that I certainly did not want to be a part of it.
So I tested Flock. Quite a bit I must say. I am not going to detail the whole thing here, this is pointless. Remember, this is a very early preview version and nothing, in particular the UI, is stable.
But the overall feeling is here : I don't see the point. Ok, having a cool well-integrated blogging extension is nice, but I certainly won't drop Firefox only for that. Flickr, delicious and other services? Bah. I could live without it before, I certainly can live without after. The shelf? Well... Well. Yahoo as default search engine? Hum. The rest? Bah.
The editor used in Flock? Cool, that makes me happy! Seriously. But I wonder what you did to hit such a bug : enter some text in the wysiwyg textarea of the blog editor, select all with ctrl-a, launch composer or Nvu, paste... I see an incorrect /> pasted after the clipboard's contents. Or if I create a list, a CR at the end of a list item does not create a new list item!!! How the hell did you do that since this is builtin in nsHTMLEditor? I suspect you are trapping keyboard events so keypresses don't hit nsHTMLEditor, and I have NOT taken a look at the code. If I am proven right, that's bad, very bad design. If nsHTMLEditor is so far away from your expectations that you have to override |nsHTMLEditor::KeyPress()|, then you really need the plaintext editor, not the HTML one.
So, sorry Bart, but I'm not impressed at all. I am even concerned, like many others, about your business model. It's not a technologist's bizmodel, and I am not sure Flock - as it is today - brings really new value and a radically enhanced browsing experience. Furthermore, Firefox extensions are not compatible with Flock, and that is such a pity that I don't understand how anyone can accept it.
Prove me wrong, please...
Comments
The ability to synchronize bookmarks across browsers in realtime does it for me. Their bookmarks manager is a good start at trying to take the train wreck that is modern browser bookmarking systems and add some sanity to it by reducing the clutter and adding tagging. Also, being able to switch bookmark toolbars on the fly is a very nice feature.
I don't really understand what the acronym hype is about surrounding flock but it has some nice features, I like the theme and it has potential. It feels like using FF 0.4 all over again.
Hey! Its just the first release.
The idea is to iterate new ui to build a browser experience that better matches how we browse the web these days.
With extensions - just about any extension should work so long as the author says that it will. Since we're a different application than FireFox we have a different uuid so extension authors need to update their extensions to declare that they support flock (just like they had to do for 1.5)
Anyways - yes, there was a keypress override for a last second "fix" for some specific styling that people wanted. Has been removed, sorry about that - it just slipped out due to our slightly premature release...
Thank you for the fair and detailed feedback.
It is awesome finding gems on the web like your site!
Now, when can I play with a new user version of N|vu? ;-) I tried to help a couple of people migrate from a MS product some months ago, and Nvu 1.0 was not up to the task, and the www.nvu.com website was not as complete as it is now so it was not a good opportunity to provide feedback.
dbeckham: I recently saw a Firefox extension doing the same, in a very nice and well integrated way. Can't tell more about it, sorry, so don't ask.
Ian McKellar: "as long as the author says it will", that's exactly my point - and the heart of the problem ! I don't see that many extension authors (1) test their extension with Flock and its own uuid (2) adapt it to Flock and have two different sets of XPIs. Please also remember that your code is GPL, that anyone can take it, revamp it and make extensions to Firefox based on it. Could be tricky, but hey, that's only code after all and they're plenty of smart guys around. If that happens, Flock is in bad shape...
Anthony: eh, I know my code ;-)
Daniel: you need to remember they are working with trunk Composer, not the souped-up version in Nvu (and, given that you've made so many improvements, you might agree with them that the current trunk version is less than ideal in several ways).
I'd really like to see some of the Nvu improvements to the Composer core make it into Flock, hopefully via mozilla.org CVS ;-)
Gerv: my improvements to the core editor will certainly not be helpful to Flock. They're so related to web page authoring - and not article authoring for a blog - that they're out of scope here. In fact, I really wonder what was the bug that made Flock override the builtin KeyPress behavior. Something related to trailing <br>s ?
[censored, it's because of that kind of #&*£ù%% I closed the comments a while ago]