Ubuntu Tutorials

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about the Flock Browser, and after checking it out today I thought it was time for an update here at Ubuntu Tutorials.  For all of you that are addicted to all of the social networking sites (Digg, Twitter, Facebook, del.icio.us, Flickr, etc) you get an integrated-into-the-browser experience with the Flock Browser.  Follow the steps below and give ‘er a try:

Install Flock Browser v1.2 on Ubuntu 8.04

Unfortunately there are no .deb packages for the Flock Browser so you’ll have to install things manually.  Yes, this’ll require some commands at the terminal.  Yes, I’ll give you cut-and-paste commands.  No, the terminal won’t eat your cat.

1. Download Flock Browser v1.2 and select “Save File” to store it on your Desktop.
2. Open a terminal and run: sudo tar -C /opt -xzvf Desktop/flock-*.tar.gz
3. Create a link to the new browser within your PATH: sudo ln -s /opt/flock/flock /usr/bin/flock-browser
4. Dump the following into a new file: /usr/share/applications/flock.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Flock
Comment=Flock Web Browser
Exec=flock-browser
Icon=/opt/flock/icons/mozicon128.png
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Applications;Network

You should now have a new entry in your Applications menu called “Flock Web Browser” (your menu may need to refresh first).  You can also launch the browser from the terminal using the command:

flock-browser

Enjoy!  Anytime there is a Flock Browser update you should be able to safely repeat steps 1 and 2 and you’re set.

Many of you might be familiar with my post concerning How to install Flock on Ubuntu. I’ve been using Flock now for months and I really enjoy it. Recently, however, I noticed that a few multimedia functions that I had supported in Firefox were not supported in Flock, despite the fact that the correct plugins were installed. After a little research I realized that this was due to Flock merely not knowing where to find them. Below is a quick one-line command to make sure Flock matches any multimedia support that Firefox has, whether this be Flash Player 9 Beta on Ubuntu, Java, etc.

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/* /opt/flock/plugins

Basically, if you didn’t follow what that command does, it simply creates a symbolic link inside the flock/plugins folder to any plugin available in firefox. Running this command will make sure that anything supported as a Firefox plugin will also be supported as a Flock plugin (this, of course, is based on the fact that Flock is based on Firefox).

note: if you’ve added or updated any plugins for Firefox you may need to repeat the command to re-sync anything new to your Flock plugins.

I re-found something today that I had forgotten about. It outlines a couple of quick methods you can use to speed up the Firefox engine and make pages load more quickly for you. I set this up again this evening and see a noticeable speed increase.

Here are five steps for speeding up your browser.

1. In your address bar visit: about:config
2. Find: network.dns.disableIPv6. Set “true”
3. Find: network.http.pipelining. Set “true”
4. Find: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. Set “8″
5. Find: network.http.proxy.pipelining. Set “true”

This little trick has been around for a while. I wanted to get it out there for anyone that hadn’t known about it. Also make sure I write it down so I don’t forget it again the next time I re-install (which I do far too often).

technorati tags:firefox, flock, http, browser, speed