Flock 1.0
For years, Firefox has been the browser of choice here. It started as a love affair with tabbed browsing that continued to flourish with each new extension and add on. The built-in spell checker was a constant reminder of how deep the love really was. I just read a book about this intense, passionate affair between two people that ended in tragedy because the male character had an extremely dark side. And while the affair with Firefox didn’t end in tragedy, it did end and it was because of its dark side. You see, Firefox has this problem with leaking memory that would drive me crazy numerous times a day, every single day. I wanted to enjoy all of the things I knew Firefox was capable of, but it was frustrating having to close down and restart the entire browser on a repeated basis.
A friend recommended Flock a few weeks ago, and as frustrating as the Firefox experience was turning into, I didn’t think the answer was a new browser. It turns out I was wrong. After reading a review on TechCrunch for Firefox 3 Beta 1 that had a huge plug for Flock’s lack of a memory leak, I decided I was going to take the plunge. I’m so glad I did. Flock has all of the things I loved about Firefox (since it’s built on the same rendering engine), plus a few new features I didn’t even know I was missing with none of the dark side. Opening 20-30 tabs doesn’t mean I will be restarting the browser soon because its memory use has spiked, tripling and even quadrupling that of other high powered applications like Photoshop.
Flock is touted as the social media browser – when you first load it up, you’re prompted to configure the browser to recognize all of your accounts such as Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, del.ico.us, and Photobucket. I don’t think I’ve completely tapped into the true power of the social media aspect of this browser just yet, but I’ve been enjoying the integration and ease of connecting to my favorite sites.
The eleven Firefox extensions (or addons) I was using (Ad Block, Firebug, Forecast Fox, Greasemonkey, IE Tab, Picnik, SearchStatus, Stumble Upon, TabMixPlus, TwitterFox and Web Developer) work beautifully with Flock. Although I would have liked the ability to export my Firefox extensions to import them into Flock, this move gave me a chance to dump a few extensions I wasn’t really using anyway.
Importing my Bookmarks into Flock went smooth, although I didn’t initially like that all of my imports were in their own folder instead of sitting at the root of the Favorites menu. It took a couple of days debating on rearranging using the Favorites Manager before I decided I actually liked how they were set up. One thing I don’t like is the way Flock handles adding a new Favorite. Firefox asked me where I wanted each new Bookmark to go, but Flock takes some configuring before it will mimic that behavior.
My biggest complaint about Flock was the way it handled new tab events. Some times a new tab would open to the right of the tab it originated from, some times it would open as the last tab on the right, some times it would open to the left of the tab it originated from – it was all pretty random and confusing. To make matters worse, the new tab’s text didn’t always stay red to make it easy to find. This was enough to make me seriously contemplate which was worse – the memory leak or the faulty tab behavior. Thankfully, I didn’t have to contemplate long because I came across a fix for the tabs thing.
If you want all of your new tabs to open to the right of all other open tabs, do this:
- In the browser’s address bar, type “about:config” (without the quotes).
- Find the setting for “browser.tabs.openNewTabsOnTheRight” and set it to True (double click on it)
Voila! Tabs behaving the way you’d expect them to. So far all new tabs have been opening with the red text and staying that way, as well. Hopefully the Flock developers add the ability to change this via some more obvious menus soon.
Have you been having a problem with Firefox’s memory leak issue, but love everything else about the browser? Are you into social networking? I’d highly recommend making the switch to Flock!
