His application recorded the memory usage of the browser every three seconds over a period of three hours each and the graphs show clearly that there does not seem to be an end to Safari’s memory hunger. In the end Safari was using more than 630 Megabytes of RAM compared to 111 Megabytes for Firefox 3, 191 Megabytes for Flock, 190 Megabytes for Opera and 194 Megabytes for Internet Explorer 8.

The conclusion of the author is that “Safari on Windows shows extremely poor memory management [..] certainly a design that looks inefficient and seems to contradict Apple’s marketing”.

Firefox 3 on the other hand seems to have memory efficiency written all over its face.

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Flock is built on top of Firefox and the team have been working hard over the last couple months to upgrade Flock to the new Firefox 3 base.

Flock 2.0 Beta 1 was released last night and is a substantial update to Flock 1.2. The official blog said the following:

The Flock 2 beta marks a very important watershed moment for us. And we have some amazing things planned for the remainder of the year, so please help us refine this product by running Flock 2 beta (one), and logging imperfections by using the ‘bug icon’ in the upper right of your browser.

Key changes are primarily to security, stability and performance and no key new features have been introduced. However improvements and enhancements are across the board and include some very welcome changes.

The biggest one for me has been to the People sidebar, previously in Flock 1.2 the number of supported accounts was causing the sidebar to fill up and for accounts to be lost past the border of the bar. Flock 2.0 changes this and makes it easier to see all the accounts at the same time, which you can see here:

Small changes yes, but necessary. It can become easy simply incorporating new features with every release but it needs constant review in order to assess how the existing features can be improved.

Bookmarks and tags are now located in a improved Favourites Library which improves bookmark management and organisation and is also significantly faster then the previous manager.

Performance has been considerably optimised, and Flock now has a larger system footprint, but improves memory management so having multiple tabs never gets out of control.

Aside from these you can also expect additional support for online applications Gmail and Zoho, a new download manager, the awesome bar (of which Flock already had a similar version), improved password manager and much faster page rendering.

To get an idea of what Flock page loading speed is like take a look at this test of Firefox technology compared to Opera, IE and Safari.

Flock is a worthwhile upgrade. Yes it’s buggy but not so much as to cause any major issues, get it here.

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Google Gears is one year old now, and although we haven’t seen a huge adoption across the web, it is extremely useful if you use any of the Google services likes Docs, Reader, Calendar and Gmail.

I’m finding myself using Docs increasingly over the last few weeks and I really need access to my files offline, unfortunately Google Gears is officially only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox. I presumed the Firefox extension would work for Flock as it’s built on the Firefox code base, but for some reason it doesn’t.

Luckily a quick Google later and I found Martin over at capcloud discovered converting the Firefox Gears extensions into a Flock extension to be fairly simple:

Following the instructions that I found on the Google Gears Google Group, I repackaged Google Gears as a Flock extension. (The only other converted Gears extension that I found seems to be for OS X.)

You can install the extension by clicking here.

Once you have downloaded this simply use Flock to open the file and it should install just like a normal extension.

Martin only just updated this on April the 24th, so there should be no reason for it not to work.

Hope you find it useful!

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I first read about Flock in a PC magazine a few years ago, and didn’t really comprehend what the whole thing was about. The words web 2.0 came up, as did visionary and I really had no idea what it meant. Web 2.0 was meaningless to me (in fact it is still debatably meaningless)

This was back in the days when Facebook was a college students only site and I really wasn’t much into the whole social networking thing. In fact it still doesn’t really appeal to me, sure I have a lot of accounts in various services but most of them I only use on the odd occasion.

I actually think this is where most people get the wrong idea about Flock. It’s marketed as the "social-network addicts" browser and understandably that’s not how many of you would wish to label yourself.

However you don’t have to be this sort of person in order for Flock to be an incredibly useful browser for you. Flock in fact has literally hundreds of features and integrated services which will make life a whole lot easier for you.

Your first reaction to this may be that any of this functionality could be simply added into Firefox with extensions, and that’s perfectly true. The reason I prefer Flock however is because everything is built in, optimised, secure and safe… it’s a lot faster then a Firefox browser the same features added in. You can actually still add any extensions into Flock because it’s built upon Firefox, it’s not recommended but it should work.

I won’t go into detail on every feature offered in Flock, but I will say that now is as good a time as any to give it a whirl. Seriously, try it out for a day or two… you may as well..

Flock beta 1.2 is here and it introduced AOL mail, Digg and Pownce integration.

If you’re a blogger Flock has a killer feature for you… Web Clipboard Sidebar… drag anything from a webpage onto it and it’ll stick around for later. It’s incredibly helpful for research and grabbing random scraps from round the net for an article later.

Hope you get converted too…

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It recognizes a lot of social sites like Youtube, Facebook, Del.icio.us and integrates these sites, allowing you to navigate them using the browser interface. A great example of this is the Flock toolbar, which has a small icon for people. By default this shows you a sidebar with your registered social sites, along with the people associated with them. If you have new friend requests, the icon turns red, giving you a cool visual indication.

Flock also supports bookmarking to your favorite sites automatically, it has an awesome web clipboard that recognizes links, pics and text, a great RSS reader, much like Google Reader and it is riddled with small but handy features everywhere. All Firefox extensions have worked for me so far, but some people do report that a large number of extensions slow Flock down more.

There is a full blog editor in there which works fine for simpler entries and for most bloggers, but for the pros it won’t be enough. It is able to post, but I couldn’t get it to select categories for me, only tags. If you have a simple private blog though it will work great.

All in all I favor Flock over Firefox, now that I am using a lot of these social sites. A Flock rep told me that once Firefox 3 is out, they will also change their version and Flock will be built on the new Firefox, so that’s something to look forward to. On the negative side there are some more sites that could be built in like Digg for example, which is a mystery why it has been left out. I see a lot of potential here just waiting to be developed, I do hope it will be!

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