…tell me that it sucks.

I know, I know. It’s in very early stages. It’s not fair to judge a project in early stages. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple.

1. It’s built on top of Mozilla Firefox, which they tout as a “feature”. Unfortunately, for Mac OS X users, it means that it interface is designed to suck. XUL on OS X just doesn’t cut it. Mac users rightfully demand carefully-crafted UIs with the user in mind. This isn’t. You can feel at just about any point in the UI — the top and bottom bars in the browser window, the contextual menus, the preferences window, heck, even the about box — that, during design, nobody bothered to test this on a Mac (or, some people did, but didn’t really know much about Mac UIs).
2. And don’t get me started, even, about the little fake applications that launch before the actual browser launches. Something appears in the Dock, starts bouncing, then disappears. Something else appears, then immediately disappears. Then, nothing happens. Just as you start thinking “maybe it crashed”, the actual program starts running. What’s up with this?
3. It also doesn’t use OS X’s Keychain. Why would I want to use the Firefox-style password manager when I have a perfectly fine, highly-encrypted, more flexible and application-independent password manager right in my system?

I like the basic concept of this, but as someone else noted somewhere (on digg, maybe), it would be much better as an extension to an existing browser.

Even if I did want to ditch my beloved browser for this capability (which I currently don’t, thankyouverymuch), why does it have to be Firefox-based? Don’t give me that cross-platform nonsense. The actual Flock code can’t be that complex that it’s so hard to port. If Skype can provide perfectly native applications for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux/Qt and Pocket PC, why can’t Flock?

Give me either an extension for Safari that does this (’this’ being integration of del.icio.us — or alternatively Yahoo! MyWeb2 — , Flickr, tagging and blogging right into the browser), or, if it has to be, write my a browser that uses Gecko or WebCore, but write it natively. Aqua. Not some fake crap like XUL.

Thus, harsh as it may be, my judgement after just four minutes of using this piece of software is: it sucks. And I don’t expect it to suck much else in version 1.0 either.

Update: amon chimes in with a lot of good points, especially:

the FAQ clearly contains questions the developers would like the users to ask.

Indeed, reading the FAQ gives you the impression that the developers didn’t even for a single minute step down to think about what the users would like to know. Like, uh, “What is it?”, “Why should I care?”, “What advantages does this have?”. Nothing.