Installed Flock 0.9.0.2 on my laptop today, quick and easy as root:
Dixie# pkg_add -r linux-flock
Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/Latest/linux-flock.tbz... Done.
Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packages-6-stable/All/linux-hicolor-icon-theme-0.5_1.tbz... Done.
And it is installed as linux-flock in my search path, very useful. I have used Mozilla based browsers for a long time. Years ago I started with Firefox 1.x, it was a great improvement over IE5 and 6, tabbed browsing – I was hooked instantly xD
As I got to spend a lot more time on the computer, I soon came to find Firefox less then perfect. The big bonus to using it had become greater portability between websites and OSes, some thing that is a bit of a must for me. I alos use Konqueror and Opera a lot among other browsers.
I tested Flock 0.7.x on my windows box awhile back and was rather impressed, while not perfect it was still pretty great. With a bit of that ‘surfer’ feel to it 🙂 I did not think though that it would scale to my laptops hardware quite well though. On a Pentium D 930 with 2GB of RAM, to a Sempron 3300+ with 512MB of RAM… But so far it has actually scalled a lot better then Seamonkey or Firefox 3.0 snap shots !
The main reason I discontinued working with Seamonkey and (Netscape) Navigator (9) was because while I liked them quite a lot, Navigator is actually a nice set up IMHO. The lack of responsfulness, particularly while editing text in fields like this and on forums made it less them ideal on my hardware. Even on the faster Desktop I occasionally noticed slow downs during text editing. On my laptop, even Firefox 2.0.0.x and 3.0a builds had the same issue on my laptop.
So far, Flocks Linux version does not, and it is starting faster then Netscape or Seamonkey ever did. And the funky font issues of using Linux Firefox and friends on PC-BSD no longer seem to apply to PC-BSD v1.4.x systems:-)
The thing I enjoy the most about Flock is the web clipboard and services support, especially for ma.gnolia. Being based on Firefox, Flock is still pretty easy to use but I find most of its shortcomings are inherited from Firefox! All of which seem to relate to configuration options…. But it does add enough other capabilities to be a bit of an improvement over Firefox 2 and 3a imho. And like Netscape Navigator 9, should work fine on Google Doc’s and friends hehe.
I think most of the Firefox extensions and add ons should work with Flock, doubt most themes would but Flock has a very nice default theme unlike Firefox. I have never really used much in the way of Firefox Extensions and Add Ons, although I keep several installed in my Desktop; I usually don’t use them ^_^.
Now if only Flock didn’t use the same crappy Spell Checking technology that Firefox does……… *sighs* I really wish Vim or Google would create a portable spell checking library based on their code, because they offer the best spell checking I’ve ever found =/