今天收到Flock的mail：“We can’t wait any longer. Today, we are pleased to invite you to try what will very soon become the Flock Developer Preview.”信中提供的下载地址还有口令认证，但现在似乎任何人都可以下载试用了。

Flock是什么？

如今的Web浏览器与10年前相比，并没有太大的变化：当你用浏览器打开一个网站的时候，无非在这网站四处闲逛，观看视频或者聆听歌曲，然而环顾四周，你会发现自己很孤独，因为这只是你一个人的行为。而现在这一切将会有所改变，新兴公司Flock接受了这个挑战。

Flock是一个基于Firefox的浏览器。Flock 被描绘成“Social web browser”，不像微软的IE浏览器，Flock的浏览器是针对Web 2.0的，当前互联网用户对被动地浏览网络媒体内容并不满意。

Flock期望将浏览器打造成为网络协助、Blog、共享图片以及网络团体聚会的平台。该公司的创始人和首席执行官Bart Decrem表示，Web网页不应该仅仅是文档等内容的载体，更是事件和人们聚会的平台，带有社交的色彩，为此用户将花费更多的时间在网上。

Flock有什么功能？

• The Blog Manager
• The Flickr Topbar
• RSS integration
• Favorites with del.icio.us integration
• The Shelf
• History Search

Flock目前有哪些不足？

Flock才刚刚发布Developer Preview版本，肯定还有很多不完善的地方。比如安装完Flock后的Readme中就提到：

• Flock still doesn’t import your Firefox or IE favorites
• Flock does support Flash, but other plug-ins have NOT been tested
• While we have ten or so of the most popular Firefox extensions working, we need to come up a way to make most Firefox extensions working in Flock and/or cajole extension authors to make their extensions work with Flock.目前在Extend页面有10种插件可用。
• Firefox themes do not work with Flock
• clear Private Data doesn’t work for History Search results. There’s no way to make Flock lose your history search index in this build (yeah, we’re going to try to fix that over the next day or two)
• If you’re sharing your bookmarks, you’ll get prompted to enter your del.icio.us user ID and password every time you boot up Flock. Super annoying
• Choice! We like it as much as you do, but we must crawl before we can walk. While we support a number of blogging platforms, we don’t yet offer a choice of social bookmark services or photo sharing services
• Blogging platforms: WordPress and Blogger work pretty well.
• Movable Type 3.2 doesn’t work. Other versions of Movable Type, and Typepad.com should work
• Bad things happen if you say “Yes, share my bookmarks” and then don’t enter del.icio.us account info

说了这么多，您一定按捺不住了，那，快快尝试Flock去吧。

2005-10-21 by Dark Posted in TeCH·技术, Firefox·专题