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Flock Switches To Chromium For New Beta
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."
I dont give a flock
Get the Flock outa here!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
All they have to say is that Google steals their data with Chrome and Flock disables those features, and Flock will instantly be very popular.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
If they're using Facebook and Twitter, I think the whole point is that everyone has their data.
firefox IS getting bloated lately. .. well not. /quit
if you got 56k but a megacore megadual mega computer you're first choice would be firefox (downloadsize)
but if you got atom and 10MBbps
one would think that in the age of desktop super computers, ASM would be easy to program?
put me on nnnn-curses and lynx.
p.s. whats "flock"?
I'm kind of curious... why Chromium and not the base WebKit project? Are they piggybacking off the browser gui as well or something? It's not terribly hard to build your own browser atop WebKit, and performance wise, both the official version and Google's implementation are neck and neck speedwise. I'm not a web browser developer or anything, but every time I've used WebKit I've been able to integrate it easily into my apps with little overhead. Just wondering why Flock opted for several layers of projects over WebKit instead of just using WebKit itself.
While the change in the underlying browser engine was probably a step forward, everything else about this new flock is a net loss in features. The old flock had support for around 2 dozen different social services. including APIs for a number of blogging platforms. This one drops all that for JUST facebook and twitter. No thanks.
I know that this doesn't really matter to Mozilla per se, but Firefox is coming under some tough times in the near future. I have to say, I do fear for the future of my favourite browser (my favourite by a mile, dispite its flaws).
They're soon losing the Google funding and support (probably).
They seem to be not taking ANYONE's side on anything.
H.264
Ubuntu, even, seem like they'll switch to a custom Chromium browser in the next couple of releases.
They don't seem to be leading the market in features at all any more, and only seem to limply suggest that it's the best by focusing on security (note: I DO think it's the best, what I mean is the public image).
Do other Firefox fans feel that the market might deem it unnecessary or out of touch?
--
But, but, Google is evil!
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Flock that!
After all the fanboi ravings, I don't see what can't I get from another browser.
Isn't that important? The ipad/iphone/Mac all feature Safari.
--Sam
So now Flock is Chrome + Javascript application layer on top of that. The Flock devs are aware they can basically write javascript extensions, right? Those extensions will work on all 3 platforms of Chrome/Chromium.
Why not just release them as pure Chrome extensions and call it a day? What is the benefit of calling it a separate browser?
The Chromed Bird extension for Chrome was what caused my wife to switch over. It is my favorite Chrome extension for any platform.
Flock was taken a Linux/Mac/Win product and turned it into a Windows only product without offering anything new or worthwhile.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This is why the SRware Iron so popular, ja?
I'm using it right now right now. It's actually a pretty nice secondary browser because you can plug NoScript into it, and in general, it's nicer than Opera, Safari, Chrome, K-Meleon, or IE. If people aren't using it, they really should give it a go. I don't know what that whole 'social browser' thing is all about (I don't use MySpace or Facebook or any of that crap), but as a second Firefox it's great.
Mozilla corporation seems to be pretty badly run. They solicited donations for the NYT ad(some of my poor college friends scraped together money for it) while overpaying the CEO($500K per year)! The management was supposed to find different ways of getting funding but Mozilla is still dependent totally on Google(which competes with it's own rival browser). Mozilla made $66 million in revenue just in 2006 while development was largely done by unpaid volunteers.
In the meantime, Firefox was quite bloated, crash prone and lost the speed race to Chrome, Thunderbird stagnated and nothing really innovative or useful came out of Mozilla labs. Ubuntu will probably switch to Chromium and Firefox will start losing search revenue. . Probably the only thing going for Firefox are extensions(Chrome supports extensions now) and proper Adblock. Things are so bad that the CEO is planning to step down
Sad to see one of the epitomes of FOSS go down in flames like this.
This space for rent.
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Etc.
I had a sig, but
I just wish it had true ad-blocking. Not seeing ads is nice, but nothing really beats actually getting rid of them completely (both for bandwidth and security).
Other than that, I agree, Chromium is pretty nice. I installed the unstable (dev) version as a test, and now I find myself rarely using Firefox. I even installed Chrome on my Windows box, and use it happily around 75% of the time, even if it is blissfully sending my history to Google (I really don't do anything that anyone would ever care about, but for more secure uses I stick to Firefox).
Firefox has gotten pretty bad, of late. It takes around 3 times as long to open, and gets sluggish much faster. For some reason Mozilla decided to gut all added Win7 functionality, while adding a bunch of completely moronic features (Personas, really? Was that worth ANY dev time?). Chrome/ium uses more RAM total, but RAM is cheap, and somehow it never feels as sluggish as Firefox.
Though, as I'm typing this I have two pop-ups telling me that Chrome stopped responding, while typing this through Chrome.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Can we please stop talking about Lost! Geez...
Chrome/Chromium still doesn't have an adblocker that actually blocks ads instead of just hiding them. Adblock Plus saves bandwidth, finishes loading a page quicker because you'll never get hung up on a slow/dead ad server, and neatly reformats the page to work without the ads.
Once THAT level of functionality in an adblocker arrives with Chrome/Chromium, only then will I consider switching. And don't tell me to use a HOSTS file; what if I want to whitelist certain sites?
This is why the SRware Iron so popular, ja?
Pretty much. I remember running it through Wireshark a few months back and noticing it was still trying to connect to Google servers. It was less so than the default installation of Chrome, but nearly identical to Chromium after deselecting some options. SRWare Iron is such a freaking joke...
From the 2nd paragraph:
"Note that Chrome doesn't actually support this all the way, so a few resources might still load before AdBlock can get to them, in which case we'll remove those as usual."
The reason SRWare Iron was developed was to drive hits to the SRware site, which has ads that net the developer revenue. The whole "privacy" scare is just a tactic to convince users to go to the site to get the browser. In any case, if a user doesn't trust Google with their data, why would they trust some unknown developer?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
Since the release of WebKit and the dominance of WebKit based browsers on the mobile platform, there has been lots of pressure on FireFox to switch to from their own Gecko engine to WebKit.
WebKit is open source like Gecko, but unlike Gecko, WebKit is driving the HTML5 standards. Since WebKit is open source, there is no real reason FireFox must have its own unique rendering engine. In fact, it'll free up resources at FireFox to work on other aspects of their browser.
Flock, moving to Chrome is just putting a bit more pressure on FireFox to switch.