Time To Get More Social By Downloading Flock 2.0

What can I say? Here I am declaring my love for Opera one week, and the next I’m talking about how great Flock is.

Well, as I said in my last browser review, I use both Opera and Flock about equally - for no real reason apart from my inability to choose one over the other. Basically I use Opera for the speed, and Flock for all the great features.

Flock contains what would literally take hundreds of extensions in Firefox, and pulls it off without a huge performance hit or lack of stability.

That said, Flock 2.0 is a beta product so it goes without saying that you can expect a few more issues then normal.

Tina introduced Flock (version 1.1) on Make Use Of a couple of months ago. Since then Flock has released version 1.2 and two betas for Flock 2.0 as well.

With growing popularity (over 4 million downloads) Flock has a business model similar to Firefox and gets income from Yahoo based on the number of Flock users per year and for having Yahoo search as the default Flock search engine.

Flock 1.2 introduced a number of new features and enhancements but I noticed at this point that Flock was beginning to suffer a bit from successive releases continually adding more functionality without addressing usability.

I stopped using Flock for a while, mainly because of this. Not long afterwards however Flock 2.0 beta was released and in this release the Flock team had concentrated on the performance, interface and usability of Flock rather then adding any more features.

This review covers everything you can expect to find in Flock 2. Flock is built on top of Firefox and so can take advantage of all the Firefox 3.0 performance improvements and innovations, some admittedly inspired by Flock itself.

Supported Services

The purpose of Flock has been to make web services part of the browsing experience, rather then just something you use your browser to access. Of course given the sheer number of web services, the decisions on which to include in Flock could be quite controversial.

According to Evan Hamilton the decision making process involves the popularity of a service, the ease in which it can be integrated, whether or not an API is supplied and how well it will fit into the browser’s direction and focus.

As of version 1.2 and 2.0 Flock includes these services in these categories:

Features:

All the features themselves have largely all been reviewed by Tina in her review so I won’t go there.

Some of the new usability changes and enhancements include a slight improvement to the people sidebar. Previously the increasing number of services was overflowing the sidebar and resizing it resulted in concealing or hiding these.

Flock 2.0 makes some changes so icons relocate and fit the sidebar size. It could still do with some improvement, but it’s a lot better then before. You can see the before and after shots below:

The bookmarks and favourites manager has also been greatly improved and I would say it is the best browser bookmarking system I have seen.

Both local bookmarks, browser history and online bookmarks are stored together and can be sorted and managed together as well. Additionally the Firefox ‘Awesome Bar’ is part of Flock and gives even easier access to favourites and history. If that isn’t enough for you then you can do pretty much the same thing from the search panel next to the address bar which undoubtedly inspired the awesome bar.

The Media Bar also got a revamp, but as I don’t particularly use that feature I won’t comment on that.

Performance:

Performance improvements for Firefox are well documented, but unfortunately just about all the comparisons of Firefox 3 I have seen are with Firefox running with no extensions.

Comparing Flock to Firefox is ridiculous just like I mentioned above, it would take hundreds of extensions to get the functionality of Flock with Firefox.

If you fire Flock up and check the memory footprint you may be surprised to see it is actually larger than Flock 1.2, just as Firefox 3 is larger then Firefox 2. Don’t be alarmed, the footprint is bigger but the overall memory management is significantly improved so memory usage shouldn’t increase with time.

With the great new performance and memory management of Firefox, all the previous Flock features and some great interface enhancements Flock 2 is a must-have download. That said, it might be worth waiting a few weeks as beta 2 for Flock 2 seems to be a little unstable, more so then beta 1 in my experience.

What do you think? Are you a Flock fan? Or can nothing tear you away from Firefox or Opera?

(By) Laurence John was born naked, screaming and utterly helpless at some point in the last century. He currently blogs about heroic failures and the development of Windows 7.