Flock Switches To Chromium For New Beta 154
An anonymous reader writes "Flock, the social networking browser, has moved from Firefox open source code to Chromium in its latest beta. The new Flock is essentially a combination of Chrome and TweetDeck, as you can sign in to Twitter and Facebook accounts and look at a single feed that incorporates updates from both. Currently, the beta is only available on Windows, but a Mac version is slated for later this year."
Re:Why not WebKit? (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. (I'm one of the Flock devs.)
Chromium is much more than just WebKit, and Flock is reusing most of that. Their UI was very well thought-out, and their V8 JavaScript engine is incredibly fast -- making it a perfect platform for Flock's application layer code which is almost entirely JavaScript.
BTW, since the original article doesn't contain links, here's the site where you can grab the beta if you're so inclined:
beta.flock.com [flock.com]
Mac version is in the works.
Re:Why not WebKit? (Score:4, Informative)
Not sure when. Only 1-2% or so of our 2.x user base was on Linux, so it's not a high priority right now -- but that doesn't mean it won't happen. A few of our devs definitely want to see it happen... but I can't offer a timeline for it right now.
Re:Chrome Extensions (Score:5, Informative)
Why not just release them as pure Chrome extensions and call it a day? What is the benefit of calling it a separate browser?
Chrome extensions don't allow for the UI we added in Flock. No sidebars, etc...
Also, extensions are much harder to monetize than browsers, so it would be a lot harder to make a successful business out of it that way.
Third, we're going for mass market rather than niche. Extensions are cool and all, but most web users out there don't have a clue what an extension is, let alone a browser.
The new Flock will be Windows/Mac at least. Linux is still a possibility too. We think the new version offers an improved experience for most users. Not quite as feature-full as the old version, true, but it's much faster and simpler which is a good trade-off for most users.
Re:I CAN'T give up Firefox just yet (Score:2, Informative)
Firefox memory & Flock business model (Score:3, Informative)
Well I do have to restart Firefox every day or two to clear memory leaks or fragmentation, which begin to make it unusably slow. But I once had to do this much more frequently, so the problems are getting gradually fixed. It takes a long time to quit after being used for a while, which makes me think it's got an awful lot swapped-out.
If you're not experiencing this, perhaps the leaks are in one of the extensions I use.
As for Flock, it appears its business model is the same as Firefox: search engine product placement. This was with Yahoo, but it'd be interesting if it stays that way, considering it's now based on a Google browser.
Re:Not so fast... (Score:2, Informative)