Last updated Saturday, May 27, 2006

Flock - One browser too far?

After my browser love-in yesterday I was reminded of Flock. It was launched as preview in late 2005. Built on Mozilla's open source code the business model was to gain market share by offering users an excellent experience. What was that excellent experience? Well not much - RSS, easy blogging and maybe instant messaging. Errr.... what's different from most of the other major browsers?

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Flock has taken open source code and too their credit are maintaining the releases as open source code. The problem is that they are VC funded and that they will have to make some serious money. I remain unconvinced that they can make headway into the saturated browser market. Unless they have got something really good up their sleeves I can’t see it happening. They are offering Firefox plugins and a few gimmicks but nothing new.

Moreover development doesn’t seem be going very fast. They are still on release 0.5 - the same release that was offered in December 2005. In the same time Firefox has gone from 1.0 - 1.5. As far as I know they haven’t gone bust and the blog on the site talks of active development. The first formal release is due in May (although it isn’t out yet) and if they don’t get it out soon it will all be lost in headlines of the IE7 release.

Perhaps I’ll be proved wrong but I wouldn’t put my money into it.

Have an update or suggestion for this article? You can edit it here and send me a pull request.

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