Flock 1.0.3 was released a couple days ago and auto-installed on both of my Vista machines without any problems (unlike this guy). However, this release doesn’t do much. As best as I can tell from the release notes page, the only fix was for a code signing issue with the Windows Installer. In the meantime, the forums are filled with bug reports and suggestions.

I like Flock so far. It’s a neat idea for a browser. However, my suggestion is for the Flock team to be a bit more proactive in summarizing existing issues, prioritizing them, and keeping the community aware of forward momentum. Otherwise they may lose their #1 asset they have right now, which is buzz and good word-of-mouth. My own issue #1 (WordPress login credentials not being saved properly) has been around for over five months. I can think of a few reasons why this bug might still be open:

1. It’s not a priority. I find this hard to believe since (a) Flock makes a big point of “integrating” with blog, photo, and social-bookmarking sites; and (b) WP is one of the biggest blog platforms around.
2. It’s very technically challenging to fix. I also find this one hard to swallow since it’s just credential sharing. This problem has been solved 1,000,000 times.
3. The team is overloaded. This one is more probable.
4. The architecture is poor. I have no idea if this is the case, but as a software manager, if easy problems start taking a long time to fix, I start to wonder what kind of messes my developers have to wade through.

Any ideas?