Flock 2.0 beta is out: Social browser built on Firefox 3

Filed under: Internet, Social Software, Beta

Flock 2.0 beta is out: Social browser built on Firefox 3

by Brad Linder Jun 16th 2008

If you spend a lot of time using social web sites like Facebook, Pownce, Digg, Flickr Twitter, YouTube, or del.icio.us, you've probably heard of Flock, a web browser with integrated tools for interacting with those services and many others. The browser is built on Mozilla's Firefox, so it can render any web page that works in Firefox. But it also makes it easy to share links, photos, and videos or even write blog posts.

But there's one problem. Up until now Flock was based on Firefox 2 and couldn't take advantage of the speed improvements featured in Firefox 3. With Firefox 3 set to launch out of beta/release candidate limbo tomorrow, the Flock team has released the first beta version of Flock 2.0 which uses Firefox 3 as it's base.

What does that mean for users?

Uses the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine for faster page rendering
Improved support for web applications like Gmail and Zoho Office
Reduced memory footprint
Security enhancements
Improved password manager that takes up less memory
Uses the Firefox 3 "awesome bar" which auto-completes URLs based on your history and favories
New favorites manager
New download manager

For the most part you won't see a lot of cosmetic changes in Flock 2.0 It looks a lot like Flock 1.2 under the hood. But it's worth checking out for the performance enhancements. Keep in mind, this is still beta software though, and if you're lucky you might find a few bugs worth reporting.

Tags: firefox-3, flock, flock 2.0, flock-2.0, flock-2.0-beta, Flock2.0

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

WolvenSpectre said 9:47PM on 6-16-2008

I started using Flock recently after trying it a long time ago. I had to stop because the RSS wouldn't work right, the browser slowed down to slower than IE, some of the social network integration is falling a little short, and finally I was running into login probems with gmail that I had to correct with a firefox plugin. I understand that it is a work in progress so I don't holdit against them.

Now its going even MORE beta as they include the Fx 3 code... no thank-you.

Thats why I am glad that I am an Opera 9.5 user.

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