Feeling the need for speed, latest beta of the Flock browser is ditching Mozilla Firefox for Google-supported Chromium. Flock is the social networking remix of the popular Firefox browser, sporting deep integration with your social media websites and services. You might recall that Blackbird, the browser geared toward the black community, is based on Flock. Chromium is the open-source equivalent of the Google Chrome browser.
The Flock 3 beta is currently only available for Windows, but a Mac version should be ready by early July. Previous versions of Flock were basically Firefox with a gang of social networking plugins and services integrated. I had really wanted to get into it, but speed and resource usage was always an issue for me. This version of the Flock browser is a completely different beast, primarily because of the new underlying code. Chromium/Chrome is made for speed and efficiency while Firefox is just now trying to catch up in those departments. The have also trimmed the fat and only support a handful of services, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr.
A monetization partnership between Google and Flock puts a big Google search bar in the middle of your Flock homepage. Could this be part of the reason for the change in browser engine? Who cares. I think the switch is a good deal not only for Flock, but also for it’s users and potential users. Keeping up with all of your social media activity is a challenge for most and Flock has always aimed to make it easier, it was just slow and bulky before now.
When you first start Flock, it will ask you to connect with Twitter and Facebook. This is to be expected as it’s a social web browser. What is more interesting is the Flock sidebar, which is the first sidebar in Chromium. The sidebar is where most of the action happens, streaming updates from your social networking connections while you browse the web. A “Talk about this page” button makes sharing across your social networks as easy as a click. The “superbar” which combines search into the location bar also pulls up your social media contacts.
You would think that the Mozilla version of Flock would be a done deal at this point, but Flock CEO Shawn Hardin says this is not the case. They will continue to support the Mozilla version of Flock and are planning to release a new version of it. Hardin says that Flock has had a relationship with Mozilla for 5 years and they have no plans to sever it at this point.