Flock divorces Firefox, snuggles up to Chrome instead Video

Flock divorces Firefox, snuggles up to Chrome instead Video Transcript

>>There's a new Flock in town and it's with out a doubt the biggest change to the social browser since it debut. Hi, I'm Seth Rosenblatt for CNET Download.com and in this first look video I'll be giving you a quick tour of the revamped, redesigned and redone Flock 3 beta. The most important change in this version of the browser currently for Windows only is that it's built on Chromium. So, where previous versions of Flock were socialized remixes of Firefox, the new one is a socialized Chrome. After you install the browser it will ask you to fill out some social networking logins. These are required to use Flock but you're missing the point of the browser if you don't. Once you're in the browser, you'll see the impact immediately. There's a new sidebar on the right that features a stream of your account updates. You can hide this with a click but what makes it really useful is that is offers a broad range of filters. There's Facebook only, Twitter only and unread messages. You can customize what appears on your stream through inter-account filtering, friend filtering and groups. The best friends and co-workers groups are empty by default but filling them out will give you a pretty good hands-on tutorial on how to create your own groups and you can go from there. I found Flock's new bookmark bar to be too cluttered to be useful and this single options menu labeled Customization might overwhelm some users. However, three buns on the left of the location bar are exceptionally useful. They may look familiar but there's a lot more to them here. The Home button will jump you to a Google search page but has links to your favorites and groups at the top. Favorites performs the familiar Favorite's functionality with optional tagging and note adding. The Flock's specific talk about this Page button will instantly share the link via Facebook and Twitter. The in beta browser currently only supports Facebook and Twitter but that should be enough to cover most people's needs. Long time fans of Flock might be shocked by the lack of a robust tool set that covers far more social networking services as well as image uploading, e-mail and more but I think that this more agile and nimble rendition of the browser has the potential to be adopted by more people. With your first look at Flock 3 beta, I'm Seth Rosenblatt for CNET Download.com