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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
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?
--
Yes, they are using the GUI as well. And they are probably doing so to cut development time for other things they care about more than reimplementing another GUI around WebKit.
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
Mac version is in the works.
Not really since you can't use Flash on either the iPad or iPhone, so the only way to view streaming video is through HTML5, and presumably H.264. In either case, HTML5 fins.
Macs can run any browser of your choosing including Firefox and Chrome, which do support VP8. VP8 just seems like a better choice than H.264 for streaming video. Perhaps when all the other major browsers support VP8, Apple will add support.
Linux version?
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.
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.
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.
It is common knowledge within certain programming and Internet addict communities that Chromium is open sourced. For people outside these communities (which is the vast majority of humankind) it is not common knowledge.
Feel happy when you can enlighten someone to a piece of knowledge. But don't lord it over them. They are sure to know many things common to their communities of which you have no idea. The first step to being accepted by people (getting friends, wife, getting along with workmates etc.) is learning how to accept people.
Dissing someone for not knowing what Chromium is just reeks of an inferiority complex. Learn to accept that others know things you don't know; and you know things that others don't know.
Should I say you've been living under a rock because you don't know these basic concepts of social behaviour, which are ubiquitous across different cultures and time periods? No, it is much better to tell, convince, persuade. Resorting to insults, or astonishment which implies disrespect is just aggressive behaviour, which is something which most societies do not accept (except for the fact that people being aggressive to one another can be fairly entertaining).
If someone asks "what animal does beef come from?", there are several ways to respond. I will list two.
Correct
Incorrect
[person who asked question now feels incredibly stupid and will respond either with aggression, or avoidance of you. Either way, they will not like you]
[alternatively, you will receive a lecture from the politeness police]
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
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?
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.
That's right - if you say type in a URL that would have been blocked, AdBlock for Chrome won't do anything. It can only block resources requested by the page (before they download). http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=35897