Goodbye Flock
This is a test post using the ScribeFire blogging plug-in for Firefox. I’ve been using Flock for years now, but it’s been eating up so much CPU that it’s rendering my poor little Macbook Air useless. On top of that, the start up and shut down times are unacceptable.
My usage of Flock has changed over the years. At first, I had the People sidebar open all the time, first showing my facebook friends updates, then later adding in Twitter and Flickr. Occasionally I’d use the Media Bar to view a stream of photos featuring my Facebook friends (something I don’t think you can do anywhere else). I always loved being able to click the “star” next to the address bar to bookmark a page and add it to del.icio.us. Finally, blogging an article was as easy as right-clicking and choosing “Blog this page”.
While the bookmarking and blogging functionality are still part of my routine (and what I think I can duplicate with firefox plug-ins), I’ve stopped using the People sidebar and the Media Bar. Why? It’s a matter of granularity. TweetDeck has become the perfect Twitter application for me (although occasionally seems to need a re-boot as well) because of the easy interactions built into the app – replying, direct messaging, looking up a profile, tracking @replies, grouping contacts. Facebook’s Live Feed shows more data; Flock seemed to just say “Profile updated” without showing what happened. Flickr’s new homepage is similar – I know what changed, not just that something happened (reminds me of Bacn). Regarding the Media Bar, this is still a neat feature, but something I didn’t use very often at all, because the images were too small to see clearly yet so big that it cramping my regular browsing experience.
If Flock can fix it’s performance issues, I’d be willing to go back. When Chrome comes out for Mac, I’m going to give that a try. In the meantime, I’m going to keep flying with Firefox.