Nick Jordan

I’ve been playing with the latest version of the Flock web browser, and it’s good. Very good. In fact, it’s come so far since the last time I tried it that it’s practically a different beast altogether. It now imports all your bookmarks, cookies etc. from Firefox, the browser upon which it’s based, flawlessly. It connects to services such as Flickr and Facebook automatically when you log in to them, and shows you a very nice summary of your contacts’ activities in a sidebar. It does all manner of cool things. But. I just can’t quite bring myself to use it as my main browser. Something’s still not quite right.

I think it’s partly that I can’t configure things I want to configure (I don’t want to see the bookmarks toolbar, but I do want to see the very handy Flock toolbar, for instance, but they seem to come together or not at all). It’s also partly that I don’t like the way RSS feed content is displayed and, while I could simply continue to use Google Reader as I do now, it goes against the grain to use Flock and not use all the facilities it offers.

In short, I recommend trying it. If you like it, and you may well, then use it. But I don’t think I’ll be switching just yet.

I’m currently having a bit of a play with Google Desktop for Linux, and so far I’m suitably impressed. It installed on my computer without a hitch and is now busily indexing everything.

I tried the Windows version on my work computer when it first came out, way back in the mists it seems now, and the way the Linux version works is pretty similar, although it doesn’t have all the desktop crud like weather reports and news feeds. No loss there, quite honestly, I can live without all that. Besides, I can understand that it’d be hard work to get it to play nicely on KDE, Gnome and all the other desktops that are available for Linux.

Anyway, using it is simplicity itself. Configuration is done via the browser, and then it’s just a question of hitting the Ctrl key twice to summon and dismiss a simple search box, which will pull together results from the web and your local machine. It seems to work very well indeed, although it’d be nice to see it also indexing Google Reader and Google Documents. I suspect that that’ll happen in the future.

If you’re a Linux user and you’re after an application like this, give it a try. I reckon it’s better than Beagle, although these things always come down to personal preference, of course. Some people may have privacy concerns, which is entirely understandable, but I’m happy that my information isn’t going beyond my home PC. Famous last words? I hope not.