I’d love the idea of Flock. Really. I miss an application that easily connects my desktop space with the web space — without cluttering my screen with dozens of windows from different programs that only fake to work together.

There are simply some problems that keep me from making it my standard browser …

• Where’s the responsiveness? Sometimes I wait half a minute to have a new window opened and the page displayed. I get the Spinning Beachball of Death after whatever action I do. And — it gets worse over time. It drives me mad, because since when do you quit a browser as long as you’re on a computer? I never do, there’s always at least one window open.
• Flock is supposed to support tags. Indeed, it gets the tags for my del.icio.us-Bookmarks. But it doesn’t do anything with them. It does not even suggest existing ones when I “star” a new website. This is IMHO plain stupid — tags will only work the way their supposed to if there is some kind of consistency, which is achieved by suggesting existing tags to the user. Just the fact that you can use all new tags all the time doesn’t mean that your supposed to so … at least not, if you want to use tags as a tool to organise data. Which leads to the next gripe.
• Flock integrates with del.icio.us. Other than some kind of search, Flock just lists the links. Why not implement an interface that does more with it, like del.icio.us direc.tor? Shouldn’t be that difficult, right?
• And, by the way: Why is creating a bookmark called “staring”? (Yes, it is, believe me.) I see, you can make some beautiful buttons with stars on it, but apart from that: puleeeze … not yet another word for an old concept! You use the word bookmark anyway, so why can’t this action be called bookmarking? No need to reinvent the wheel here, really.
• Using a modal dialog to bookmark a page is ugly. Modal dialogs are butt-ugly anyway, but given the fact that Flock uses panes everywhere, this could easily become a small pane as well. It’s sometimes nice to be able to copy some text from the page into the description.
• And hey, why is there no direct link to my del.icio.us page?
• Blog-integration is beautifully done, at least for my blog, which is running on WordPress. But then again: Why can’t I use Markdown? Why is this Editor the default and not the Source? Why does it have to mess around with the code I write? Why can’t I create templates like for citing websites? ecto provides that, which is why I’ll continue using it.
• The shelf is a neat idea. But why does it have to be opened to drag things in? Yes, I know that there’s a context menu, but it seems more natural to have a smaller pane to drop things in — after all, there are other wells scattered around.
• And the Shelf eats Unicode characters. Not much of a help if you have to clean up your quotes you collected before …
• And, by the way, why can’t I tag those snippets? Maybe I collect snippets about all different kinds of topics throughout the day, so it would be nice to be able to tag them for future reference.
• The Technorati pane is a nice idea as well. To bad, the interface doesn’t work at all: Do I really want to have the page I was looking comments up for be replaced by one of those comments? Naa … not really, those comments should go in a new tab. Having of those comments previewed by a roll-over becomes quite tricky: stray just a few pixels to the top or the bottom, and the text switches. Neither the list of the blogs nor the preview convey a sense of a complete overview. And the preview has far too long lines to be readable.

Thus concludes my list of Flock gripes. Quite much already … and enough to stay with Safari.

Tagsoup: Browser, Flock