Firefox 3 is out for testing

Yata! For those Firefox fanboys out there, Mozilla Firefox 3 beta 1 is already available for download. You can get it here. I myself have been a Firefox fan and have been using it since as an alternative for Microsoft’s IE. I like to argue among my friends that Firefox is better than IE in many ways. However when my Firefox 2 started crashing few weeks ago, I started to lose my faith in it. It is then when Flock became my new best friend.

From the Firefox 3 reviews, it is said to be better in terms of speed. The Installation, execution and termination and the uninstall process of the beta is quick compared to the previous Firefox 2. The user interface is improved for simplicity and easier to access. Security is boost up with add-on plugin and it is integrated with anti-virus applications from your system. Other than that, there are also complaints that the Firefox 3 is still weak in memory management. There is still a memory leak which consumes load amount of memory when Firefox 3 is fired up with multiple tabs browsing on rich contents. You can read more Firefox 3 beta 1reviews here.

I did not check out the Firefox beta myself yet since it is only for testing. But I hope by the time the release of the full Firefox 3, it would be much more stable and has better memory management than the previous Firefox 2.

Ride of the Flock

Since the release of the new Flock 1.0, the ‘social browser’ had been given high ratings and positive remarks from popular sites including CNET. This could be a new threat to other popular web browser such as Internet Explorer, Opera and Netscape. If you don’t know what Flock is or you were left behind, you can read more about it here.

With the soaring popularity of blogging and social networking nowadays, Flock developed a web browser that works well with these websites. With Flock, you will “feel closer” to your social network and blog sites by a few clicks. Below is a screenshot of my Flock.

From the screenshot, you can see the dark bar just below the address bar. This is the Media bar. With it, you can view all photos that your Facebook friend’s uploaded in thumbnail view. It doesn’t have to be Facebook, you can also view photos from Flickr, Photobucket and even YouTube. On the left of the browser is the People sidebar. As you can see in the People sidebar is my Facebook account. The sidebar displays all your friends on Facebook and their status in which they were last logged in. If there are any changes to your friends’ profile, the sidebar will highlight them. This works as well when your friends upload photos to Facebook. And that’s not all. Flock is also embedded with its own feed reader and a blog editor. With all these features it is really easy to get around your social network or blog account.

I had been using flock since the latest release 1.0. And since then I had never experience Flock crashing like my Firefox. The Firefox I’m running had been crashing occasionally on my computer when I attempt to stream media files. Flock currently works great for me after Firefox, but I will not guarantee that it will not break down since it is still new.

I personally think that Flock is a great browser especially for those who are savvy users of social networking and blogging. Therefore, I suggest that you get your copy of the latest Flock and try it out.