Incessant Expressions

This is now the second time that I’ve dumped Firefox-cum-social-integration browser flock, this time for reasons other than “it needs a lot of work.” It still needs some work when it comes to various extensions and the UI is still kind of stuck in the Netscape field but mostly, over the atrociously tiny font used by default. Luckily for users, this is not changeable by any option available to you in the Options screen and why it’s set to something as tiny as 9pt (or whatever it actually is), it’s too damned small for anything smaller than a 15″ screen.

I also dumped it because of all the background services that I never use, like its integration with Flickr or Twitter. Some of this is based on the fact that the default size of the sidebar for integrated services is too large and cannot be made smaller –which looks great on my already cramped 12″ screen– but because I haven’t used them since I installed flock and configured the services. I posted to my blog once from flock, never uploaded any pictures to Flickr from flock, and used the built-in Twitter client perhaps three times. All of these background services only served to suck up precious battery life and RAM. Battery life is less of an issue now that my 3rd party extended battery is here but I’ve been noticing a lot of slowdown in generally using flock now. Page loads aren’t slowed but page viewing was getting slow and at times, tab switching was slow. Flock solved many of my memory leak issues with Firefox 2 but with Firefox 3 fixing a huge number of those, I can’t see any reason to continue using a browser chock full of services I don’t make use of.

My use of Firefox 3 was nice and snappy, with the memory usage to match pre-1.5 FF so I can no longer continue using a battery-sucking-but-RAM-freeing browser any longer. I’ve got enough battery for hours and I can kill Firefox to reclaim that memory. Too bad I can’t kill flock to reclaim my precious battery life!

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