If Firefox ever does go down the wrong road or starts to decline, then it's my guess that Flock will be one of the main contenders to take its place mainly because it�s based on the same engine but with a greater focus on social networking integration.

Flock 2 is the second major release of this excellent browser with most of the improvements relating to enhanced security, performance and the interface. In fact, many of the enhancements are identical to Firefox 3 such as the enhanced Add-Ons window which now shows the plugins you have installed in the browser and allows you to disable those that might be causing issues. Similarly, when you close the browser and have multiple tabs open, Firefox 3 and Flock 2 now both ask you if you want to save the current collection of tabs for next time.

One of the biggest individual improvements as far as I can see is that Flock�s Feed Reader is now much easier to update. In the old version, you�d have to wait hours for it to update itself but now you can just manually refresh it at your leisure. This includes individual feeds, a collection of feeds or all of your feeds. It also now tells you when you last updated each separate feed which is useful. Another major plus in Flock 2 is that The People Sidebar is now much more accommodating - previously if it filled up or you narrowed it, you wouldn't be able to see all the sites you had tabbed but now that's no longer an issue.

In terms of speed, there's not really any major improvements although for my money, it's always been a tad quicker than both Firefox and IE anyway so it's hard to improve on that. It does hog your RAM slightly more than before though although this doesn't seem to increase too much however many tabs you have open.
There are a few enhancements however that doesn't seem particularly useful. For example, they've added the Revver video network into Flock's Mediabar, so you can search for, view, share, and subscribe to streams from Revver. I would much prefer to have seen a YouTube mediabar instead - quite why they chose Revver I don�t know as it�s one of the less-known video sites.

Overall though, if you've never given Flock a go, you might be pleasantly surprised by this latest release - if you like Firefox 3, then you'll definitely find something to like in it.