Flock+Firefox 3 = Flock 2.0

Flock, the Mozilla-based social browser, is now available in a newly released beta version, Flock 2.0. This latest version of the browser comes after a big round of funding – $15 million led by Fidelity Ventures, which has infused the company with energy and resources to keep plugging away at improvements to Flock. The company is also reporting a huge uptake in the number of users, with a 250%+ increase in users since January 2008. That may be due to their recent win of a 2008 Webby for Social Networking or them being listed at #6 on PC World’s 100 Best Products of 2008.

Because Flock is built on Firefox’s codebase, today’s release of Flock 2.0 brings with it the latest performance, security, and UI enhancements of Firefox 3, including faster page rendering with the Gecko 1.9 engine, reduced memory footprint, faster-running web apps like Google Mail and Zoho Office, malware detection and blocking, and site security that’s validated from the address bar.

In appearance, the new version of the browser offers a location bar that auto-completes like Firefox 3 based on user history and favorites. A new Favorites Manager combines favorites, tags, and history and the new Download Manager now lets you resume downloads after a restart.

What’s most noticeable about Flock 2.0 is that they’re now really trying to ease the transition for you by making you feel “more at home in the browser.” To do so, they’re using more OS-specific buttons and web forms, while also surfacing features like the session manager, so the browser seems more competitive with Firefox3.

They’ve also reworked both the Media Bar and the People Sidebar to make these things more intuitive. The Media Bar now lets you rename, organize, or delete streams easier than before and the Sidebar is now scalable – reducing its size doesn’t mean giving up tabs.

With every new release, I keep giving Flock another shot. As much as I love what they’re trying to do, they’ve yet to hit the sweet spot for me yet. (A FriendFeed sidebar would help, though).

What most people don’t realize though is that Flock can run a lot of Firefox extensions. Since I recently had to go through an extension refresh thanks to Firefox 3, this seems as good a time as any to give Flock another shot. Would you? Or have you given up on Flock already?

You can access Flock 2.0 from here: www.flock.com/beta/download