Flock 2.0 beta is out: Social browser built on Firefox 3

If you spend a lot of time using social web sites like Facebook, Pownce, Digg, Flickr Twitter, YouTube, or del.icio.us, you've probably heard of Flock, a web browser with integrated tools for interacting with those services and many others. The browser is built on Mozilla's Firefox, so it can render any web page that works in Firefox. But it also makes it easy to share links, photos, and videos or even write blog posts.

But there's one problem. Up until now Flock was based on Firefox 2 and couldn't take advantage of the speed improvements featured in Firefox 3. With Firefox 3 set to launch out of beta/release candidate limbo tomorrow, the Flock team has released the first beta version of Flock 2.0 which uses Firefox 3 as it's base.

What does that mean for users?

• Uses the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine for faster page rendering
• Improved support for web applications like Gmail and Zoho Office
• Reduced memory footprint
• Security enhancements
• Improved password manager that takes up less memory
• Uses the Firefox 3 "awesome bar" which auto-completes URLs based on your history and favories
• New favorites manager
• New download manager

For the most part you won't see a lot of cosmetic changes in Flock 2.0 It looks a lot like Flock 1.2 under the hood. But it's worth checking out for the performance enhancements. Keep in mind, this is still beta software though, and if you're lucky you might find a few bugs worth reporting.

Tags: firefox-3, flock, flock 2.0, flock-2.0, flock-2.0-beta, Flock2.0