The Release Note

Hi Folks,

Right on the heels of Flock 1.2.3 is Flock 1.2.4.  This release contains Mozilla’s Firefox patch 2.0.0.16 as well as a few other fixes.  1.2.4 is on our website now.  Editions, localizations (including our latest translation to Japanese!) and Automatic updates will be available in the next couple of days.

There will be a Flock 1.2.5 sometime in early to mid August to move Flock over from Youtube’s soon to be deprecated API.

Thx,
Mike

Hi Folks,

Mozilla has released their 2.0.0.15 patch for Firefox.  We’re about a day or two behind with our follow on patch.  We’ve got a couple of additional fixes we’re trying to land and test before updating everyone.  These bug fixes include:

• Improved Digg performance
• Fix a sharing bug with the new version of Yahoo! Mail
• Fix the media magic on YouTube Videos

Our current schedule looks like we’ll release to the website Flock 1.2.3 on Thursday, 7/3.  As this is just before a long Holiday weekend in the US, we’ll be updating the localized builds and turning on the automatic updates  for all editions on Monday 7/7.

Thx,
Mike

Hi Folks,

There is a bug in Apple Mac OS 10.5.3 that can cause Mozilla based browsers such as Flock and Firefox to experience unkillable hangs after installing Mac OS 10.5.3. Bug details are here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436575. We’ve pulled this patch forward from Mozilla’s Firefox 2.0.0.15 patch and released a 1.2.2 to the site.  We’ll update the localized builds on Monday.  Also, since this bug only manifests itself on initial install of the browser, we are not going to release an Automatic Update for this version.

The remaining pieces of the Mozilla’s 2.0.0.15 patch will be released as part of Flock 1.2.3 release in a couple of weeks.  Other fixes scheduled to be included are:

• A fix for the media magic on YouTube videos
• A fix for Digg refreshes
• A Yahoo! Mail sharing bug
• Better apostrophe encoding
• A Magnolia login fix

Flock 1.2.3 will be released to all editions and languages and will be available as an automatic update.

Thx,
Mike

Wow… there has been a ton of release activity mostly around Flock 1.2 So much so I haven’t had a chance to keep you all updated with in a reasonable time frame. This is going to be a pretty long blog post with lots of detail. Grab a cup of coffee and I’ll fill you in.

Since the last blog post on this blog we had an emergency rollout of 1.1.4 to accommodate a Facebook change. The change unfortunately could not be done with as a web detective fix. This was probably one of the quickest turnaround times from bug discovery to in the field fixes we’ve ever done. The bug was discovered on the evening of May 12 and the fix was turned around and out in the field by May 13th. The ironic part was just as we were deploying the fix after an exhausting 24 hours, Facebook changed their page again. Fortunately this second change was fixable via web detective. It was very impressive to see everyone at Flock mobilize to fix this bug so quickly.

But that’s all old news. We’ve recently released Flock 1.2 (and shortly afterwards 1.2.1). First, and very excitingly, we’ve added two new localizations.

• en-GB - Queen’s English translation thanks to bouncysteve!
• zh-TW - Traditional Chinese thanks to Hillwood!

Flock 1.2.1 was released two days later when realized we were sending what some people would call private information to Digg. Basically, there was a feature in the RSS reader that would let you know if the article in the feed had been dugg or not. To do this we were sending over the feed article in the clear to Digg in an API call. Since we take our user’s privacy seriously we decided to yank out this feature. We’ve been working with Digg to provide a way for us to send an encrypted hash to avoid any privacy issues in the future.

The final little challenge for 1.2.1 was getting the automatic updates out. One of the things we monitor is the rate of daily update pings that comes in from the Flock browsers. A significant dip usually means that there is a bug in the field that is causing people to stop using the browser. About 3 days after turning on the automatic updates we saw a significant dip in update pings but no corresponding storm of feedback in email or on our forums about something being broken. This was troubling and confusing. We were worried that we had either broke Flock so bad that people were not using it or, some how broke the update mechanism. Ether scenario would be far less than optimal.

But, as it turns out, one of the things we inadvertently did differently for 1.2.1 was to provide a full update instead of a partial update to most of our users. (we usually provide partial updates for one release back and a full update for anything more than one release back. In this case we had a short lived 1.2 release so everyone that was still on 1.1.4 were getting full updates). So, instead of a couple hundred bytes we were sending 9 MB for Windows and Linux and 18MB for Macs. When downloading updates in the background, Flock (and Firefox) will download the update package 300k at a time every 10 minutes as to not diminish the browsing experience. For a full download this could take 8 hours! While downloading the update, Flock will NOT send further update pings, which makes sense, and if you use your browser for a couple hours before shutting down for the day, it will take several days for the full update to download. During that time, no update pings are sent explaining the dip we saw. Mystery solved and what we’ve done is to make a partial update for 1.1.4 to 1.2.1 users and turned the updates back on.

With all this distraction we haven’t been able to wrap getting the final localizations available. We should have the final localized versions available for 1.2.1 (IT, ca and hu) very soon.

That’s all for now but more coming soon!

Thx,
Mike

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Hi Folks,

Flock 1.1.2 is now available in Simplified Chinese from http://www.flock.com/versions.  Many thanks to Hillwood and Stef!

Thx,
Mike

Hi Folks,

We’ve turned on the automatic updates for 1.1.2 so they should be showing up at your browser doorstep in the next day or so.  L10N versions are also available at http://www.flock.com/versions and automatic updates will be turned on tomorrow.

I’m very pleased to announce the availability of 1.1.2 now in Hungarian!!!  Thanks to Csega, Stefan and Dukebody!

Thx,
Mike

Hi Folks,

We rolled out a couple of Web Detective fixes over the last couple of days to fix the following issues:

• Login detection with Facebook
• Media magic not showing up on Picasa photos
• Logout detection with YouTube
• Persistent session in Magnolia after logging out

Thx,
Mike

Hi Folks,

Not much really.  As many of you may have read, Flock is launching an Eco version of the Flock Browser with a new skin, some favorites and a bunch of feeds related to the Environment just in time for Earth Day.  Originally, Flock 1.1.2 was to be the container for all this content.  During our testing we noticed some really slow first run startup time because of all the feed content loading in.  We decided to roll a 1.1.3 version of Flock for Eco with a fix that does a better job of not bring the browser to it’s knees  while loading in a ton of feeds.

Since we’ve just started rolling out 1.1.2, With 1.2 (aka Grouse) just around the corner in May, we didn’t want to burden the user community with yet another update.  Unfortunately, a couple of download sites have picked up 1.1.3 off of our mirrors.  So, if you see a Flock 1.1.3 out there on a download site, don’t be dismayed.  You haven’t missed much and all that love will be in Flock 1.2.

Thx,
Mike

Hi Folks,

Yesterday we released 1.1.2 to the Flock website.  We’ll begin automatic updates on Monday as well as release the L10N versions.  This patch contains

• The 2.0.0.14 patch for Firefox
• A couple of Gmail fixes
• A fix for using the updated Truveo API.

Thx,
Mike

Hi Folks,

On Thursday Flock released a Web Detective upgrade to fix the automatic login detection for YouTube.  All Flock 1.1.x browsers should be picking up this change.

Thx,
Mike