Flock 2 Beta

Well this month has been all about browsers as both Firefox and Opera release new versions and people compare each of the 4 main competitors Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari.

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.

Update: Flock switched from Firefox's engine to Webkit in 2010. The project one year later was discontinued and there has been no new version of the browser ever since. For about a year (that is since April 2012) a message is displayed on the browser's old home page indicating that it may not be dead yet and resurrected in the future.

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