Flock Beta Now Powered by Chromium ☀
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!
