Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Flock ditches Firefox, moves to Chrome

Flock, a social focused web browser is one of most popular social web browser in open source firefox browser. As per news coming from TechCrunch, next flock will be built on Google's Chrome platform. Flock has achieved 6 Million number of downloads and USD 30 Mn funding within 3 years of operations. Popularity of Flock as a browser is very low and it doesn't have significant market share; even lesser than netscape.

The reasons speculated for this migration are: lesser attention by Mozilla to develop this browser any further and ease of operations with Google. However, recent comments from Flock CEO Shawn Hardin reads like this on Tech Crunch:

I was responding to your email from only a few hours ago when I saw your article. It’s important to clarify a couple of things. We haven’t ceased development efforts on the Mozilla platform. Our upcoming release of Flock 2.1 is built on the Mozilla platform. Having said that, the browser space is heating up, and we’ve seen a variety of exciting technologies emerge over the last several months that are appealing.

We always have and will continue to make architectural decisions that balance what’s best for our users and what’s best for Flock as a business. This has resulted in a healthy, growing user base and business for Flock, and we expect this to continue in 2009. In fact, with over seven million downloads almost entirely from word of mouth, Flock enjoys a highly satisfied user base with consistently over 92% customer satisfaction, very strong net promoter scores, and an average of four hours of usage per day.

With a continuing focus on user-centered browser innovation, our team is in active research and development on a range of exciting new enhancements to Flock. It is still far too early to comment on anything specific, but we are very excited about this design phase…

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