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Geek Culture / Flock released

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ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 04:34
The Flock browser (with a special focus on blogging) has been released at flock.com. I'd like to know, what does everyone think of it? It looks okay, but I think I'll stick with Firefox even after they get a major version out, it looks a little strange.
Xenocythe
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 04:47
Mozzilla Firefox All the way holmes.
ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 04:48
Same here

Anyhow, all it looks like to me is a nice-looking version of FF anyway.
Xenocythe
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 04:50
What did you say?
ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 04:52
What do you mean, "What did I say?"
Raven
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 04:54
Damn, that is one quick browser... and doesn't have even half of the rendering issues FireFox has.

Xenocythe
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 04:55
Quote: "
nice-looking version of FF
"


Quote: "
half of the rendering issues FireFox has
"


Xeno angry.
ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 04:55 Edited at: 22nd Oct 2005 04:57
Firefox has rendering issues?

Hey, I'm support Firefox 100% Greatest thing since sliced bread, Firefox is. And just cause Flock looks nice doesn't mean it's good.
Raven
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 05:00
Quote: "Firefox has rendering issues?"


Yes, it has some very nasty rendering issues.
Flock on the other hand doesn't seem to have as many, it also seems to have far great JavaScript support.

Not to mention the speed... I mean christ it's quicker than Explorer.

ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 05:02 Edited at: 22nd Oct 2005 05:03
Like what?

Hey, I like Firefox, but there's no way flock can be worse than IE.

Is it really that much faster than Firefox?
Raven
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 05:19
you claim to use FireFox and also are the one who started this topic.

FireFox has terrible JavaScript support, it also has a number of layer, font and other rendering issues.
The team quite obviously focus on making FireFox / Deer Park as compliant with XHTML and CSS as possible, but everything else they seem to not give a flying monkies about. Particularly compatibility.

User experiences of FireFox quite wildly change from user to user.

As for the performance:
FireFox loads this page in ~6second(s)
Explorer loads this page in ~2second(s)
Flock loads it in <1second(s)

it damn quick, the main TGC.com page in FireFox takes almost 15second to completely load, Explorer it takes around 5-6seconds in total. Flock did it in less than 5.

Undercover Steve
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 05:26 Edited at: 22nd Oct 2005 05:27
Tgc Main page. cache deleted-
ie-8seconds
ff- 7-6 seconds
Flock-2.345

whatever you do..SPAM THIS SITE
ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 05:38
WOW. I may try Flock. That doesn't mean I'm deserting the more stable Firefox, though.

Raven: Just because Firefox actually has standard JavaScript support and won't give in to Microsoft and all their special JavaScript tags doesn't mean it's bad.
Benjamin
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 05:41
It looks like a n00b created that site.

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Undercover Steve
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 05:44
Flock seems nice. But untill they have a mini banner ad, I wont support them!

whatever you do..SPAM THIS SITE
Cian Rice
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 05:55
Can anyone show me some screens of the browser, I'm just curious as to what it looks like.

Raven
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 06:14
Quote: "Raven: Just because Firefox actually has standard JavaScript support and won't give in to Microsoft and all their special JavaScript tags doesn't mean it's bad."


Bullsh*t.
I have code which contains the Explorer Specific functions, and Specification functions.

How come my Spec functions work exactly as intended in Netscape (the guys who created the damn language), Safari and Konqueror ... Yet FireFox with it's supposid "specification implimention" can't?

This extends to the OpenRico library that I use for visual effects.
I often require some creative recoding and structuring in order to get it to work as intended in FireFox / Mozilla, yet other browsers do it just fine.

imo I'm sick of each of the browser developers only implimenting things as an how they feel. Further more FireFox / Mozilla IS NOT E4X Compliant!

ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 06:19
Benjamin: You're telling me...
Benjamin
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 16:58
Quote: " Benjamin: You're telling me... "

Oh good so I'm not the only one thinking it looks like a 3 year old drawing.

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David T
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 17:18
My god this is a nice browser. I'm using it right now. Render looks the same as IE, which si nice as there were a few bits of rendering in mozilla I didn't like.

And it's fast!!!

Although - the forums main page looks weird. The "last post by" column is reeealy wide.

"A book. If u know something why cant u make a kool game or prog.
come on now. A book. I hate books. book is stupid. I know that I need codes but I dont know the codes"
Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 17:31
Just tried - I was expecting it to all be hype that its fast... Glad to hear I was wrong!! Dang it!!

@David - TGC's site renders fine for me... I'm looking forward to this going full release. Could really knock FF out the water.

@Raven, I've never noticed any major rendering issues with FF. There are a few - but thats to be expected. Its still growing as an app and the web (and its standards) change regularly. Javascript is a nasty evil language. Like you've experienced, every browser does it differently. However, I personally prefer FF's implementation.. ITs a lot more secure. Things like in IE, javascript can access the clipboard (as I recal). This was so people could make web-based WYSIWYG editors. FF cant access the clipboard for security reasons.. For exameple, imagine a script that pasted the contents of the clipboard into a form and posted the form back to the server silently without you realising (maybe in betwen page loads, etc). VERY easy to do. Also a VERY easy way to get things like credit card details, password, etc. How many people have those passwords in the for "aA86cS3tS" that are randomly generated.. And how many of those copy and paste it from a text file they keep in My Documents?

I dont think we have any perfect browsers yet. From a webmaster point of view, I hate IE.. It really sucks. It cant obey the simplest of rules sometimes! Its rendering engine is poor - it has trouble with nested tables (from experience). HOWEVER, it does have a very nice effects engine using the filters - something none of the others have as far as I know.

Raven - you sound like you've had a lot of experience with website design, care to show an example?

David T
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 17:43
Quote: "@David - TGC's site renders fine for me... I'm looking forward to this going full release. Could really knock FF out the water."


How wide is the "last post by" column? Here's its quite wide, wide enough so that the text fits on one line and is centred.

"A book. If u know something why cant u make a kool game or prog.
come on now. A book. I hate books. book is stupid. I know that I need codes but I dont know the codes"
Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 18:27
this is what it looks like...

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Raven
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 18:34 Edited at: 22nd Oct 2005 18:39
Quote: "Raven - you sound like you've had a lot of experience with website design, care to show an example?"


Experience perhaps... success is a different story.
I'm still dead set on the internet hates me, and the HTML gods don't look favourably against my code.

I've personally found that while FireFox/Mozilla does stuff like CSS and XHTML better, Explorer quite clearly is much better at HTML and in particular tables.

On the point of JavaScript, I don't see any security issues; not because there are non, but for the simple fact... I don't do anything that requires security.

All Cookies / Sessions are handled via PHP, everything I do with JavaScript is always just for interaction purposes. IMO there is no reason what so ever why Explorer and Netscape happily rendered the footer for my PDS website, yet FireFoz and Mozilla refused to resize it correctly. I even used a DIV which FireFox prefers, but when you update the size with the tagger, it didn't wanna know.
Move / ReSize the window and bam! updated.

Identical code (except for the window area size) working in one browser but no in another. No security issues, nothing but a simple lack of being able to parser the language correctly.

Even my current website design I have to hack support for Mozilla to render it even remotely correctly. All because of positioning and sizes. To me that's pain in the arse, almost as much as Explorer refusing to render CSS stuff correctly.

[edit] That's how it renders on my system.

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Benjamin
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 18:36
I like the way when you first open it, it gives the exact same import dialogue as FF. I also like the way the menus are FF but with a few more options. Very clever that.

Anyway.. I tried loading an XML file(A conversation from MSN) and it took freakes ages compared to Internet Explorer. Probably took a little less time than FF does though. My connection is so random I'm not gonna bother testing the speeds of normal webpages.

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Raven
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 18:41
Quote: "I like the way when you first open it, it gives the exact same import dialogue as FF. I also like the way the menus are FF but with a few more options. Very clever that."


Yeah, anyone would think it was developed by most of the same coding team or something...

ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 18:44
Actually Raven, if you read the website...
Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 18:44
Raven - a hint from my experience.. Design your page in Firefox/Mozilla.. It will then look fine (most of the time) in all other browsers. Then apply tweak for IE (the odd one out).

IE is pathetic at tables. The site I work with was designed by someone else years ago and uses tables nested within tables (often abuot 5-6 times!) and IE just dies. Sometimes it just gives up on rendering and leaves them blank!

As for security, I was referring to IE's implementation of Javascript - not yours

As for flock - I didn't like that it only imported from IE and not FF...

ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 18:47
< Agrees with Nicholas Thompson
Benjamin
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 18:55
Quote: "Is Flock forking Mozilla?
We have no desire to fracture the Mozilla codebase, since it is the platform upon we build. See Bart’s blog post on this topic. "


Quote: "How are you related to Mozilla?
Flock is completely independent from Mozilla. Some of us have been involved with Mozilla as staff, community volunteers, or have worked on Mozilla code in previous jobs. We plan to contribute to the success of the Mozilla platform and to contribute back to the community. "


Quote: "Is Flock as secure as Firefox?
We are building on top of the Mozilla platform, which we believe to be a very secure foundation. However, you should know that we have not yet done a full security audit and there are likely security vulnerabilities that we have created and have not discovered. The current Developer Preview of Flock is aimed at developers, and we do not recommend that you use it as your primary browser just yet."


Just some interesting parts of the FAQ..

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ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 19:05 Edited at: 22nd Oct 2005 19:07
Indeed

EDIT: and if you're complaining because it's a developer release (I don't know if you are, I'm just saying), the front page, with it 20 pixel high text, clearly said that. As did the readme (as if anyone bothered to read it)
Cian Rice
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 19:11
I love this browser!

BatVink
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 19:49
IE doesn't do tables or anything else "better", it's more forgiving because their own page-building tools don't export true HTML. If IE worked to RFC standards, Frontpage sites wouldn't display properly.

Don't believe me? Do a HTML validation on any Frontpage website on the internet. It's horrific.

ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 20:05
Then again, isn't Frontpage a Microsoft product
Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 20:13 Edited at: 22nd Oct 2005 20:14
LMAOROFL!! Hahahahaha!! Oh god thats good... What the hell kind of software development plan is that?
Mr Gates: Right.. Our HTML exporting app is pathetic - the code is rubbish!! How did this happen? No.. I dont care.. How do you plan to fix it?
Student Programmer: Well.. My idea was.. Well.. How about instead of fixing frontpage, we break IE so that it just works with it? It will be quicker!
Mr Gates: Ok.. I like that! But wont that mean properly made pages might not work right?
Student Programmer: Yeah but people are too stupid to do things properly so they use our products because they have that fancy little flag thingy on it!
Mr Gates: Yeah.. Thats true - all the proper programmers use Firefox like I do! Oops.. Scratch that from the record please...

Hehehe..
* DISCLAIMER *
The above conversation may not have happened and it may be a figment of my imagination

EDIT:
Ok, I was going to use the word s.w.a.n.k.y (without dots) instead of nifty, but it seems its classed as a bad word (I can see a bad word IN it.. but its not a bad work itself! lol)

ThinkDigital
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 20:17
lol, oh, that's good...
Jeku
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 20:19 Edited at: 22nd Oct 2005 20:21
Quote: " Then again, isn't Frontpage a Microsoft product"


Yes, and that was the point of BatVink's post :-P

I use heavy JavaScript on my own pages, and have started getting into AJAX--- which is based on JavaScript and XML. I can say that I've *never*, not *once* had an issue with JavaScript not working in Firefox. I've never even come across a known bug that has to have different code depending on the browser. Either I'm extremely lucky, or Raven is using known code that won't work with Firefox. There's many examples of IE-only HTML tags. There's probably just as many IE-only JavaScript functions, too.

Raven
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Posted: 22nd Oct 2005 20:33
Quote: "* DISCLAIMER *
The above conversation may not have happened and it may be a figment of my imagination"


i think the funniest part is meetings are apparently like that according to the guy who's heading up the IE platform right now.

this said IE7 does support things just as well as FireFox.

Quote: "Either I'm extremely lucky, or Raven is using known code that won't work with Firefox."


Most of the code I use, I learn from other websites I like the design of. Could be my adaptations to my personal needs, but to be honest I don't care about these "known issues".

If the FireFox team or anyone else using it wants to boast that it supports the E4X exactly... then the browser should bloody live up to that claim and not have any "known issues", that is NOT full compliancy / support is it?

Kinda stupid when web developers *have* to know how to get around platform limitations rather than limitations in the specification.
I think Rich said it best when he said...

"No company is ever going to perfectly support any standard."

I know my web programming sucks, but when I can wrap off code using C# into ASP.NET and watch my code work perfectly on both Microsoft using .NET 1.1 and Linux using Mono .NET 1.1, in all browsers... then quite frankly I'd say issues are certainly there with how current browser are supporting these so-called standards.

NEWSFLASH - IT'S NOT A F**KING STANDARD IF EVERYONE IMPLIMENTS IT HOW THEY FEEL LIKE IT!

ionstream
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 02:16
Okee doodle.

Its using Mozilla, but didnt a previous revision of the website specifically say that it was NOT going to use Gecko?

ThinkDigital
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 02:40
Raven: Quit swearing, and take it easy. We don't want this to become flamebait.

I don't plan to even upgrade to IE 7 unless I absolutly have to. I'm more a supporter of using alternatives to IE that I am a supporter of everybody switching to Firefox. My theory is that having an even variety of different web browsers will create standards. Once several browsers are all evenly used, they'll be forced to support standards in order to compete with the other browsers.

ionstream: the previous version of the website didn't say much of anything, actually
Pincho Paxton
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 02:45
Just trying Flock. Can I put my Bookmarks into Flock from Firefox?

ThinkDigital
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 03:50
Nope. I particularily disliked it for that. I'm gonna try it anyway though, see if it's really as fast as Raven and the rest claim...
Benjamin
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 04:31
Ok a bit of playing around with it and..

Initially it takes longer to load than IE or FF. After the initial load it seems to take a very tiny bit longer(although not always). Anyway I tested loaded a 2.13MB XML(I would have tested it on a different format only I didn't have another web page that size) file, and here are the results:

Flock - 14
Firefox - 13
Explorer - 6

Oh, and where is the stop button??

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Arkheii
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 04:46 Edited at: 23rd Oct 2005 05:06
Rats...



edit: flash problems don't happen anymore.

"Always remember, you are unique - just like everybody else."
Nicholas Thompson
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 04:48
Why would you ever want to stop?! Lol.. (JOKE).. Good point thought, hadn't noticed that yet.

@Raven, You've hit the nail on the head - but with the wrong tool.. ok.. poor metaphore. The problem is the FF, Netscape, etc all do obey the rules. Its IE that doesn't and this is the problem. Microsoft want a feature. Instead of getting together with W3 and producing the right specs for it, they just make it. Then, because 80% of people use IE due to Windows having it built it, it gets developed and people that use browsers that obey the rules laid out by W3 cant use the new feature. W3 then have no choice but to implement the new feature in the way MS have done it rather than sorting it out proffesionally.

Good example... People wanted a WYSIWYG editor for browsers - usefull for forums, etc. MS thought "hey - how about we do blah.." and without waitint for a proper standard, they added a feature to the IFRAME to make it editable (also for the BODY tag too). ONLY IE supports this. After W3 sorted it out, there is now a proper standard you can activate on DIV's that works in all modern browsers (IE, FF, MOZ, etc). Thing is - There are now two competing standards due to MS's arrogant approach of "we own the web". I dont like it at all. Fair enough when the web was evolving randomly and they were the only people - but now there are other big players. Its these kinds of domeneering actions that make people really hate them.

ThinkDigital
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 05:30
Okay, here's what I got:

Times loading the forum main page (56k connection):

Firefox - 12.8 secs
IE 6 - 14.1 secs
Flock - 14.3 secs

Strange, seeing as it was fast for all of you And yes, that was with a clean cache. Some other pages:

TGC Homepage
Firefox - 50 secs
IE 6 - 49.4 secs
Flock - 47.8 secs

Matedit Webpage (http://www.computechtenerife.com)
Firefox - 6 secs
IE 6 - 5.8 secs
Flock - 5.7 secs

I think I'll stick with Firefox

BTW, the refresh button turns into the stop button when a page is loading.
Benjamin
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 05:38
You can't exactly judge it on remote pages. All browsers will get the data at the same speed(and this speed may vary due to network activity), its a matter of how quickly they can render them.

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ThinkDigital
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 06:24
I know, but there's really no easy way to judge that.
Arkheii
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 11:23
http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/test.html

Wow, not even IE could render that test properly...

"Always remember, you are unique - just like everybody else."
MiR
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Posted: 23rd Oct 2005 12:33
A very tastefull theme you have there Arkheii....

Quote: "Wow, not even IE could render that test properly..."

God. And I thought it looked bad in FF. In IE it just shows up as a red square with error inside it.

My signature has been erased by me because it's LARGE.
Thank you for the votez!1!

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