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Flock has released the second beta of its forthcoming Flock 2, the Firefox-based web browser that features tight integration with most of the most popular social web services including Flickr, Facebook, digg, YouTube and many others.

Flock 2 beta 2 is based on Firefox 3 (3.0.1 actually) code base bringing along all the performance improvements and new features including Places, tagging, malware protection, the new location bar, web content and protocol handlers among others.

Other features include an option to manually update a web feed or group of web feeds and notifications when one is updated.

Revver has also been added as a supported media feed provider you can search, search, and subscribe to.

Flock 2 is expected to have a long development cycle according to Flock’s Marketing VP, Dan Burkhart.

You can download Flock 2 Beta 2 from Flock Beta site. Available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

As announced before, tab switching is getting a dramatic update for Firefox 3.1 in both visual and behavior.

Press Ctrl + Tab (or Shift + Ctrl + Tab) and you are presented with tab thumbnails and titles with the most recently visited ones first so you can more easily determine which tab you want to go, have the one you most probably want to go closer, and as a result get to it faster. Hold Ctrl pressed and keep pressing Tab to see the thumbnails smoothly scroll to the left while the status bar displays the tab web address.

If you need or just prefer the old behavior, pressing Ctrl + Page Up and Ctrl + Page Down will fit the bill.

While eye candy doesn’t hurt, I am not sure black is the right background color for all platforms. More tab thumbnails may also help find the one I’m looking for faster, as in earlier prototypes.

As said, there’s also a new behavior for Ctrl + Tab. Instead of just moving left to the next opened tab, now it switches between the current and the last viewed tab and I have to say I’m already loving it. I usually have to check several other pages while posting and to ease the tab switching I moved the reference tab next to the post edit tab to have it a couple of keystrokes away. There’s no need now: I just took the long way to the reference tab once and then it’s already at reach.

The new Ctrl + Tab behavior and look was originally planned for Firefox 3 but was put on hold due to time constraints.

Ctrl-Tab, a Firefox extension developed by Dão Gotwald, that has served as a prototype for this change is available from Mozilla Add-ons. The extension provides even more features including an all tabs preview with search tabs capabilities that replaces the tab list menus when pressing the List all tabs button in the tab bar edge, and an option to switch between tabs in all windows. At least the all tabs preview option is also being considered for inclusion in Firefox 3.1.

On June 17th, the day Firefox 3 was released, it got a mention in The Colbert Report during an interview with Johnathan Zittrain about his recently published book The future of the Internet - and how to stop it, referring to the many threats polluting it.

Stephen Colbert: Believe me, I’m all in favor of scaring the shit out of public. But I don’t understand. You give me the tools to frighten them.

Johnathan Zittrain: I don’t mean to be too alarmist…

SC: Oh! No, no, no! Please!

JZ: But it’s true. If you visit the wrong web site with the wrong browser, that could be it.

SC: What’s the right browser?

JZ: Well, Firefox 3 was just released today.

SC: OK.

(Public applause)

JZ: You may want to give it a shot.

SC: Firefox 3 gets the Colbert bump.

(Public applause)

The Colbert bump, -sort of a small digg effect or being slashdotted- actually spiked Firefox 3 download rate for a few minutes, according to Mozilla’s Ken Kovash, based on in his analysis of Mozilla download logs.

Firefox 3 introduces support for web-based protocol handling so instead of a desktop application taking care of irc:, im:, ftp:, mailto: and other protocol link, these addresses are passed to a defined web service provided that it is capable of parsing and processing them.

Firefox 3 ships with Yahoo! Mail and 30Boxes as bundled web protocol handlers (for email and calendars respectively) but you can easily add more as they become available.

Google for example added the necessary interface too short before the Firefox 3 release so it wasn’t included by default but you can change that.

First, you will have to enable registration of protocol web handlers from different domains.

• Enter about:config in the location bar and press Enter to access the advanced preferences.
• Look for gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost and double click it to set it to true.

Now click in the link below to add Gmail as a mailto: links handler.

Add Gmail as a mailto handler

You will be prompted with a confirmation info bar. Press Add Application.

You can now select Gmail as your mailto links handler from the Application page in the Options dialog.

Now when you click on mailto: links a new tab with a Gmail compose window will open. You can also or click on Send Link… in the File menu to send the current page address and title.

I suggest setting gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost back to false to prevent malicious web sites offering their own protocol handlers.

In case you need to remove Gmail as a mailto handler, in the Tools menu, select Options. In the  Applications page look for mailto in the content type column. Open the menu in the Action column and select Application Details…, select Gmail and press Remove.

Update: If clicking on the link to add Gmail still doesn’t work, access the advanced preferences (enter about:config in the location bar) and check that network.protocol-handler.external.mailto is set to true, its default value. If it isn’t double click on it to change it or right-click and select Reset.

Mozilla has released Firefox 2.0.0.15, a security update for the Firefox 2 that fixes 12 security vulnerabilities, four of them labeled critical by Mozilla.

Updates should be pushed in the next 24 hours but if you want it right now, select Check for Updates… in Firefox’s Help menu. If you need the full Firefox 2 download, check Mozilla’s old versions page.

Remember that Firefox 3 is the current version and according to Mozilla support policies, the Firefox 2 branch will get updates until around mid-December, six months after the current version release.

It should be noted that none of these vulnerabilities are present in Firefox 3. Nine of them were already fixed before final release and three of them don’t affect it because of changes to how related features internally work (page reflow, certificate handling and file uploading).

Firefox 3 is already on its own maintenance cycle with the first update, Firefox 3.0.1 (Mozilla has changed to three digit versioning with Firefox 3), targeted for mid-July, most likely to coincide with another Firefox 2 update.