Flock 3.5.3 running on Windows 7 displaying the Flock's new tab page. |
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| Developer(s) | Flock, Inc. |
| Initial release | April 11, 2005[1] |
| Discontinued | 3.6.4 (February 3, 2011) [±] |
| Preview release | none (n/a) [±] |
| Development status | Discontinued - April 2011.[2] |
| Written in | C++, XUL, XBL, JavaScript |
| Operating system | FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X (Intel), Windows |
| Available in | Catalan, Chinese (both Traditional and Simplified), English (US, Australian, British, Canadian), Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal + African Portuguese Speaking Countries and Brazil), Russian, Slovak, Spanish (Latin American and Spain) |
| Type | Web browser |
| License | Proprietary Software and GPL, some components also LGPL+MPL |
| Website | |
Flock was a web browser that specialized in providing social networking and Web 2.0 facilities built into its user interface.[3] Earlier versions of Flock used the Gecko HTML rendering engine by Mozilla. Version 2.6.2, released in July 2010, was the last version based on Mozilla.[4][5] Starting with version 3, Flock was based on Chromium and so used the WebKit rendering engine.[6][7] Flock was available as a free download, and supported Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X platforms (previously also Linux).
Support for Flock was discontinued in April 2011 and the developers recommended users switch to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox instead.[8][9]
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Flock was the successor to Round Two who raised money from Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and other angel investors. Bart Decrem and Geoffrey Arone cofounded the company.[10] Flock raised $15 million in a fourth round of funding led by Fidelity Ventures on May 22, 2008. The company's previous investors, Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, and Shasta Ventures, also participated in the round. "The company plans to use the funds to expand its research and development, marketing, and global expansion efforts. To date, the company has raised an estimated $30 million," according to its press release.[11]
Flock was one of the 12 browsers offered to European Economic Area users of Microsoft Windows in 2010.[12]
In January 2011, Flock Inc. was acquired by Zynga.[13] The browser has been discontinued, with support ending April 26, 2011.[2]
Flock 2.5 integrated social networking and media services including MySpace,[14] Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.[15] Notably, when logging into any of the supported social services, Flock can track updates from friends: profiles, uploaded photos, and more. Flock's latest 2.5 version added Twitter Search functionality, multi-casting of status updates to multiple services, and the introduction of instant messaging via Facebook Chat in the browser.
Other features include:
In December 2007, Flock won the Mashable Open Web Awards for Applications and Widgets[25] and in March 2008, Flock won the South By Southwest[26] Web Award for Community.[27]
CNET gave the Mac OS X version of Flock 1.0 the title of "Best Mac Software of 2007."[28] PC World's Harry McCracken reviewed Flock as his "New Favorite Web Browser.".[29]
In February 2008, AOL announced that it would discontinue support for the Netscape browser, and recommended Flock and Firefox as alternative browsers to its userbase of Netscape 9 users.[30] For the Netscape 8 userbase, AOL recommended only the Flock browser to its users.[31] In March 2008, Flock announced that they had seen "nearly 3 million downloads" and a 135% percent increase in active users in the first two months of 2008. They also announced "more than 70 percent of Flock users making it their default browser of choice."[32]
In May 2008, Flock won the Social Networking category of the Webby Awards.[33][34] Flock was nominated for this award along with Facebook, Bebo and Ning.
In April 2011 when Flock's discontinuation was announced, reviewer Joey Sneddon of OMG! Ubuntu! offered the analysis, "Whether this was down to poor implementation design wise (one needs only glance at ‘Rockmelt’ for an example of a social browser done right) or just general apathy towards having alerts from twitter, flickr, facebook, digg et al in your face all of the time is moot: Flock has flocked off and for all its innovation it never quite lived up to its own hype."[9]
Upon exiting beta Flock has won a number of awards:[22]
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