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."

Comments

No more Fireflock. What next?

[cupantae]

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?

Re:No more Fireflock. What next?

[bunratty]

Why would they be losing Google's funding, and if they do, why wouldn't they be able to get funding elsewhere? If Ubuntu switches to a different browser, Firefox will lose only a small fraction of its users. I don't think they've ever lead the market in features; they've led the market in quality. You may have a point on H.264, but they're making an ideological stand to support only freely available technologies. If they need to support H.264, they'll do it.

Re:No more Fireflock. What next?

[jasonwc]

I wonder if there is some issue on your system causing performance problems with Chrome. For example, I know there is an incompatibility between Nod32 4.0 and Chrome 5 that causes insanely high ping. I was getting 10 ping in speedtests on Firefox 3.6.3 and 550 ping in Chrome 5. After upgrading to Nod32 4.2 the issue was fixed. Chrome went from sluggish to blazing.

I find Chrome to be as fast, or faster than Firefox in all circumstances. It is usually faster. The browser loads instantly on a Core i7 system with an Intel X-25M G2 SSD vs. 1.5 seconds cold start for Firefox (around 0.8 sec without Adblock Plus), but that's running off a fast SSD. It took significantly longer on cold start off a WD Caviar Black drive, which is similar to what most people are using.

Page rendering is amazingly fast. The Adblock extension isn't as good as Firefox, but it's ok.

I really do like Chrome's multi-threading and sandboxing. In Firefox, every time a download finished, the browser would freeze momentarily while NOD32 scanned the file (disabled checking in about::config, but still happened), and often loading Adobe Acrobat files would hang the browser momentarily. Because Chrome is multi-threaded, issues in one tab never affect another tab.

In addition, while Chrome uses more RAM than Firefox because of its design, you actually get the RAM back when you close a tab. With Firefox, RAM usage balloons unless you close the browser. I've seen Firefox use 1.5 GB of RAM after 2-3 days of usage. Close all the tabs in Chrome and you're back to 70 MB or so of usage. And Chrome also loads instantly, even with many tabs.

In conclusion, Chrome's performance isn't just marketing - it is the fastest browser available at the moment. If it's slow for you, something else is wrong.

Mozilla Corp blew it...

[recoiledsnake]

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.