I was really, REALLY fed up with Firefox. The last slew of updates made it near impossible to use. It became suddenly sluggish, locked up, timed out, and anything else that grates on one's nerves when it comes to browsing the internets/www.

A couple of months ago or so, I did some looking around. I considered Opera, Safari, Maxthon, Chrome. I steered away from Chrome, because in the past, twice, I had really bad experiences w/ Chrome. Granted it was a beta era, but still. It was enough to put a wall up.

I ended up using Flock. It's based on Mozilla Firefox. "Am I crazy?", I thought to myself. I'm purposely getting away from Firefox, as much as it pains me to do so, and here I am gravitating toward a browser based on the same engine. But so far, it worked relatively okay, and it definitely worked better than Firefox.

But now Flock has switched engines to the Chrome engine! Again, I was hesitant to do the upgrade knowing my previous Chrome nightmares! So far, I like it. I don't love it, but it's usable. The thing about Flock is that it has social network plugins. I have a little sidebar (if I choose to use it) than is basically a news feed with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc, so I can keep up with those updates, comments, videos, links, replies, etc as I desire. It looks like Chrome, but it's Flock. The one thing I kind of like is that the URL is also a search bar. Just easier. Most of my shortcuts works for bookmarks. Under the Firefox engine, most Firefox plugins and extensions work w/ Flock. I do not know if they do on the Chrome engine.

Anyone else use Flock? Or another browser that you really love? I suppose this thread is an update to my previous thread about searching for a good browser. It seems that my browser has changed engines, but the name remains the same.

i havent had experience with Flock or Opera, and I prefer IE to Firefox (although the Mrs prefers Firefox) I had an interesting conversation with a computer tech a couple of weeks ago about this.

We were buying a laptop for my daughter and we were talking about Norton vs AVG, etc. I told him I got a trojan horse and AVG didn't pick it up. he said you've gone 5 years with only 1 trojan horse? that's a great track record. WE prefer Firefox. Asked why and he said "most people use IE, therefore most malacious programs are directed to IE. if you use firefox, there are wayyyyyy less malicious programs written for it.

interesting, huh

You know, I've not had a virus or a Trojan or otherwise on my computer since about 2000/2001. The only time something has popped up is when I put in an old CD-R archive disk and there's a virus saved on it. Of course, I've since gotten off of there what I want, or just gotten another copy.

I've went from Norton in 1998-2000, to McAfee, to something else to AVG. I've been most pleased w/ AVG. It updates regularly, scans everything, and has kept me protected. So I guess roughly 10 years, and no virus or Trojan issues at all.

But you know, a lot of that comes from just having common sense. Those of us (like you and I) that don't blindly click OK or download rogue programs, apps, etc are naturally protected from that sort of mess - because we don't set ourselves up for it.

Used Opera for years. No complaints, ever.

I've been using firefox for years. But lately it has been crashing exactly like IE does all the time. I mean, yesterday it crashed three times. At least it saves your windows. No viruses yet though.

I use the developer version of Chrome on Linux with a shitload of plugins. Super speedy and never had any problems. It runs the new Arcade Fire/Google HTML5 experiment like a champ, and that experiment is super intensive ---> http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

Google is the antichrist.