14 DAY TRIAL // Chromium, the open source web project that is behind Google’s Chrome browser has edged Firefox out of the core of the Flock browser.
According to Clayton Stark, VP Engineering at Flock, it was the performance of Chromium that recommended it to power Flock, a social networking-focused browser, instead of Mozilla’s Firefox.
A Beta development milestone of Flock has been available for download for quite some time now, but Ian Fette, Google Chrome Product Manager, only this week offered Stark’s perspective over Flock embracing Chromium and dumping Firefox.
“As Chromium emerged, we saw that not only was there significant improvements to performance, but also apparent was a simple and elegant user interface and architecture across all the various systems,” Stark stated.
Flock’s VP of Engineering noted that because it integrates closely with social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, Flock needs to deliver top performance in order to compensate for the impact on speed delivered by simply centralizing feeds and social activity streams into the scrolling sidebar.
In this regard, Flock needed something more than just performance enhancing techniques , that were deemed were unlikely to perform at scale.
“With Chromium under the hood, we were able to leverage web workers, and that, combined with the raw horsepower of V8, allowed us to scale the use of the sidebar to manage very large data sets (in the first few weeks after the beta launched we saw a few hundred million activities flowing into Flock’s sidebar),” Stark explained.
“Most importantly, benchmark testing shows us that New Flock with Chromium performs in the top-tier of all browsers available in the market.”
On the webpage in which it notes that the Open Source Chrome project is now powering Flock, the browser vendor is also praising Mozilla Firefox. However, fact is that Flock dumped Firefox altogether for Chrome.
“Recently, Flock released a new beta version of their browser built on top of the Chromium codebase. For those of us in the Chromium project, this is extremely exciting and encouraging,” Fette said.
“We believe that users having a choice between multiple browsers is a great thing, as it spurs innovation and competition, and lets users choose a browser that provides the best experience for them.”
Flock is described as the Social Web Browser, but although it has been around for over five years, the browser continues to be a nice application.
Flock 3 is available for download here.