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About two weeks ago we gave you a heads up that Flock 2.0 Beta was coming, and there was a lot of excitement surrounding the release since it’s based on Firefox 3.0. With that you get all of the Firefox 3 goodness including performance enhancements, advanced bookmarking, new address bar, and much more.
The Flock team has done a tremendous job of integrating Firefox 3 with all of the social features we’ve come to know and love in Flock. A good example of that is with the new bookmarking system which you can access by pressing the star located to the left of the address bar. You’ll notice that it looks incredibly similar to Firefox 3’s bookmarking system, but it also has the section dedicated to the online bookmarking services Del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia:
The most important improvements come in the way of performance, and that is largely due to the better memory management that Firefox 3 has brings to the table. Personally I opened up over a dozen tabs in the new Flock 2.0 Beta, and it just barely broke 100MB of memory usage on Windows. That’s definitely not too shabby, but they wanted to point out that it will likely still use more memory than Firefox 3:
As you probably already know, Flock has a number of powerful features built on top of the Firefox architecture that allow you to have a truly unique browsing experience. These features come with a price, and that price is a slightly larger memory footprint. Comparing Flock to Firefox with no extensions installed is like comparing apples with oranges. In order to enjoy any advanced functionality in Firefox you need to install extensions, unlike Flock which has lots of advanced features built right in. Firefox extensions will increase both the memory footprint, and the risk of memory leaks over time. That said, all of the memory improvements in Firefox 3 (including many memory leak fixes and much better memory management ‘housekeeping’ practices) apply to Flock 2, so you should experience notably improved browsing performance with Flock 2 than you’ve experienced in prior versions.
Here’s some more information that Flock has posted in regards to enhancements for the new version:
- Performance - Better memory management
- Security - Anti-virus integration, secure add-on updates, and more
- User Interface - Media Bar has some new features
- Favorites - New interface for managing and creating bookmarks
- New Flock-specific Features - Manually refresh your feesd
If you’re a social media addict then I highly recommend you take Flock 2.0 for a spin. I’m not sure if I’ll use this over Firefox 3, but I’ll definitely give it a real shot now that the performance isn’t unbearable.
Flock 2.0 Beta [via Download Squad]
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Tags: Freeware, Pre-Release, Software, Beta, Browser, Downloads, Features, Firefox 3, Flock, Performance
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For those, who will test a portable version: http://www.flock.com/node/62536
This is excellent news. As Firefox 3 hits the streets tomorrow, Flock is closely following its trail with Flock 2. That means both browsers are improving in parallel.
Flock is my default browser because blogging is my main activity on the Internet. IMHO, Flock is the leader of the pack in social browsing. As a matter of fact, it’s the only social browser around.
The question is whether that’s truly portable? Does it make sure not to create a profile folder on your computer? I had that problem when I tried to adapt the Firefox Portable into a Flock Portable.
It’s very important that the Flock team updates their browser whenever Mozilla does, and I honestly didn’t expect it to happen this fast. It just makes adapting to Flock less painful as you won’t have to sit there waiting for all of the cool features from the latest version of Firefox.
@ryan
All settings are stored in a folder called “Profilordner”. Really portable. Ive created the loader. Take a look over the Flock-Forums