TechMiso

Flock, the Mozilla-powered social browser, has recently released a new beta powered by Chromium, the same foundation Google Chrome is built upon. The result of ditching Mozilla in favor of Chromium has allowed Flock to see a huge increase in speed, bringing it on par with its WebKit-powered brethren.

Flock is faster, simpler, and more friendly. Literally. It’s the only sleek, modern web browser with the built-in ability to keep you up-to-date with your Facebook and Twitter friends.

Share web pages, photos, and video. Update your status and make comments—from anywhere on the web!

Unlike previous incarnations of Flock, the new Chromium powered browser offers a minimal design utilizing a simplistic sidebar for the built-in social networking features. Flock uses this sidebar to present an activity stream from your accounts on popular social networking sites, combining Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and RSS feeds all in to one sexy display. The sidebar is entirely user configurable, allowing you to decide what information you want to see.

I have to say I am quite impressed. While I was always intrigued by the features Flock offered, I was never able to commit myself to using the browser. The GUI was chaotic and the implementation was lackluster, even though it sounded like a great idea. The new beta is a 180-degree reversal from the previous versions and may be a worthwhile switch.

Currently the new beta of Flock is only available for Windows although an OS X version is under active development. Although Chrome offers a number of extensions capable of performing many of the same tasks, Flock offers a far more fluid and intuitive design, simplifying the process and making it easier to combine all that data in to a single, usable stream.

If you are a hardcore social networker then Flock may be just the medicine you need!

Not content to offer mere bookmark, preferences and theme synchronization between browsers, Google Chrome has upped the ante by now offering to sync installed extensions as well:

Extension sync has landed in the Google Chrome dev channel build.

It’s not enabled by default, so you won’t see it in your sync options menu unless you activate the feature via a command line switch. –enable-sync-extensions –sync-url=https://clients4.google.com/chrome-sync/dev turns it on.

Sync in and of itself is a pretty standard feature, as most browsers offer some form of synchronization through the use of third-party plug-ins or extensions. However, adding extension sync is pretty killer because there is no need to remember to download, install and configure an extension on multiple computers – do it once and its taken care of everywhere else you use that same browser.

I have been sold on Google Chrome for quite some time now, having migrated away from Firefox on OS X. I find the latter to be bloated, slow and largely unresponsive compared to Chrome, which feels lightweight and speedy. Chrome does everything I need it to do, and just as good, if not better, than Firefox.

Plus Chrome has the one feature I adore the most – a combination search and address bar. No need for the multiple input boxes, one for the address bar and one for search, like what Firefox and IE offer. Chrome does it better. Period.

The final days leading up to the WWDC saw a number of sites post rumors about a possible Safari update. Unfortunately Steve Jobs managed to walk away from the stage without ever mentioning this potential update. It appears that Apple did in fact release an update to Safari upon the conclusion of the keynote.

Apple on Monday released Safari 5, the latest version of its desktop Web browser, with a 30 percent performance increase, the addition of Bing search and secure sandboxed extensions, as well as support for more than a dozen new HTML5 technologies.

The most exciting new feature of Safari 5 is the ability to develop extensions, much like what Firefox and Chrome currently offer. This should allow for endless possibilities of expanded support within Safari – such as a native del.icio.us bookmarks extension and much more.

Check out the full list of what is new in Safari 5. This update appears to be one that cannot be overlooked.

First, We all know RSSis great. Why it’s not exploited more than it is, I’ll never really know.

In comes Feedly. An aggregate Chrome extension to kill all RSS aggregate extensions. Thank you Feedly.

Then… Fast flawless browsing is owed to all of us. Why Firefox is so damn slow now, I’ll never know. Thank you Chrome.

Between subway stations well, thank you Reeder. Keep me sync’ing happily and you’re the one.

The trio: Feedly, Chrome and Reeder.

Bow.