Flock — the so-called social web browser — has dumped its traditional Firefox core in favor of Chromium, the open source incarnation of Google's Chrome browser. CEO Shawn Hardin calls Flock 3 — released today as a public beta — the first major browser other than Chrome to use a Chromium base, and in making the switch, the Silicon Valley outfit is dumping nearly six years of history.

Flock, a social-focused browser startup that has raised nearly $30 million in venture funding, has ceased building on top of the open source Firefox browser, say multiple sources. The next version of the Flock browser will be built on Google’s open source Chrome browser platform. The last version of Flock was released in October 2008.

I've read a lot about Google's Chrome browser in the blogosphere, but have yet to see it being used in the wild. Given this observation, and my increasingly strained relationship with Firefox, I decided to give Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based, another try.  Here's what I found.

Google Chrome has now eclipsed Mozilla Firefox in the speed category. However, I still use Firefox as my main web browser because it is still better than Chrome in certain areas.But just recently, I tried a few tweaks that significantly improved the speed of Firefox making it a little bit snappier than the latest version of Google Chrome when loading webpages.

I'm a long time Firefox fan, but I've also grown fond of Google's Chrome browser. In fact, I've pretty much switched to Chrome as my browser of choice on my Windows PCs. Up until now though I've stuck with Firefox on Linux, but now that Chrome is available as a beta on Linux, I'm being tempted to switch.

The next edition of the Ubuntu Linux distribution could come with added Google, with rumours circulating that Canonical is looking to replace Mozilla's Firefox with Google's Chrome browser.

Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 might not feature Firefox as the browser of choice, and will instead offer Google's Chrome as the default Internet browser

Linux users can now get an early taste of Google's Chrome browser through the Chromium project. Although not an official Chrome release Chromium is an open source project on which the official Chrome browser is based.

The Chromium Daily Builds PPA has been keeping me up to date with the latest version of Chromium, the open source browser behind Google Chrome. Google recently released the first official Google Chrome for Linux beta. When I did a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10, I switched from Chromium to the Chrome beta.