What I really enjoy is that Firefox’s approach to new Places system is getting almost 100% similar to Flock’s Favorites solution. Yesterday, I saw “Collections”. It’s pretty good, that Firefox UI team decided to use the best modern solution that was invented by us.
What I don’t enjoy that much is that I had hard time to find any note that would confirm that Firefox uses Flock as a base for their solution. Flock is very young, we don’t look for big user base now, but what we do look for is a group of volunteers and community that could help us create a great and fresh browser. A signal from Mozilla could point potential interested people that Flock is the good place to start your story with a browser creation, especially that it’s way easier to influence our UI with good ideas than Firefox’s one. The difference is because Firefox must keep its userbase, so it’s less flexible and can’t do crazy things with UI, while we can.
The only confirmation about the thesis, that Firefox UI team is not inventing exactly the same solutions on their own I got during the Firefox Summit, after the talk about Places, I had a short chat with some guy who’s working on Places and he confirmed that they’re basing on Flock. It’s great! We invented a natural next step for managing bookmarks, and what Firefox does only confirms that we’re going in the right direction. More, it seems that IE 7 will have sth similar too! I don’t know about Opera nor Safari, but I expect them to do the same in the near future.
We are open sourced, and we are happy to see people confirming that we’re doing a nice job by implementing our solutions, but I personally would like to see some kind of “thank you” for that. For Firefox folks it means almost nothing, while for us, a small group trying to create something new, such advertisement would help a lot. So Ben, if you have some time to write a bit about how you found Flock and Favorites and why you decided to use it for Firefox, please, do so, I think that’s the way Open Source should go!
By the way, I’m just after the lecture of our internal proposal list for Flock 0.7. And I can ensure you all, that Firefox 3.0 will have the full source of ideas :)) Stay tuned, and if you want to help us, step in to www.flock.com, send us a feedback, subscribe to flock-dev maillist, join our IRC channels and share your ideas, we’re probably the best place in the world now where your crazy idea can be forged into the browser feature 🙂