Mozilla is hard at work getting ready for the launch of Firefox 3, and another Release Candidate is scheduled to be available tomorrow. They are still planning for a June launch of the next major milestone, and there is a lot of hype and anticipation surrounding the release. One thing you don’t want to forget about is the Flock browser that is based upon Firefox!
The Flock team is working equally as hard to make sure that they update their browser with all of the Firefox 3 goodness as soon as possible. As you might recall it took them quite awhile to update their browser to Firefox 2 after its release, but it appears that they won’t be making that same mistake again. Here’s a snippet that I took from a post on the Flock blog yesterday:
Within the coming weeks Flock will release it’s first beta of Flock 2.0, which incorporates the Mozilla technology that powers Firefox 3. So get ready to have all of the latest performance (memory management), security and feature enhancements found in the latest Firefox 3 release along with the unique user experience innovations only delivered by the Flock browser.
The first thought that popped into my head was that the nightly builds of Flock must already have the Firefox 3 integration if a Beta will be available in the coming weeks. Sure enough! I downloaded the nightly build (targeted towards developers only), and as you can see from the screenshot it is definitely based on Firefox 3:
Note the oversized location bar new to Firefox 3:
(Click to Enlarge)
The about screen verifies my findings, and a little snooping around will reveal some other new features that have only been introduced in Firefox 3. The most significant enhancement that I noticed would have to be the performance though. Immediately after starting up Flock it was using 66MB of memory which is a little on the high side, but it barely crawled above 100MB even after opening a dozen different tabs. Closing all of the tabs brought the memory usage back down to 82MB. This is like half the amount that the current version of Flock uses for me!
Kudos to the Flock team for jumping on the Firefox 3 bandwagon so quickly because it’s really going to pay off in the long run. I am very much anticipating the release of Flock 2.0 Beta in the coming weeks after they’ve had some time to polish-up the nightly builds, but if you’re feeling ambitious go ahead and try the latest nightly build of Flock 2.0.
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Tags: Freeware, Pre-Release, Software, Beta, Browser, Downloads, Features, Firefox 3, Flock, Performance, Release Date, Screenshots
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I’m also glad Flock is busy upgrading its popular browser following Firefox’s steps. This bowser is so good, that I’ve switched sides completely from Firefox and now use it as my default browser.
Now that Firefox 3 will soon hit the streets as a polished product, I will have to evaluate both browsers to see which one best suits my needs.
I still love Flock’s RSS feed reader, and I think it is among one of the best desktop feed readers out there. Now that they appear to have some of the performance issues squashed I might actually give it try to see if it works well as my primary browser. I’m just not sure if I really need a lot of the social aspects of the browser.
Yes, but…
Firefox 3 has a very big bug regarding the use of Sqlite. It mainly affects Linux users, so if your a Windows or Mac guy, go on your happy way. Mozilla promises a fix before the end of the year, and hopefully, Flock will adopt it quickly.
Eagerly awaiting this release too. Stopped using Flock when I switched to Fx3 since it’s so much faster.
I’m sure Flock will continue to update their browser with each subsequent Firefox release. They’ve been pretty good about that in the past each time Mozilla releases a bug/security patch.
I’m guessing the better performance will help draw a lot of users back to Flock.