Flock is dead (opens in new tab)

"They made Chrome from scratch"

They're using the WebKit rendering engine. While Chrome is a great browser, I'd hardly say it was "made from scratch".

Sure, but that was Google. If some random, unknown company made a browser just as good as Chrome, it wouldn't have gotten a tenth the users Chrome has now.

I would say Mozilla/Gecko was a very good choice when the project started. Webkit itself was just being open-sourced at the time and cross platform compatibility was lacking.

I'm sure it seemed like a great choice at the time. Remember, Flock is pretty old. The original beta came out in 2005.

Flock was open source, so presumably they prefer open source browsers.

Zynga is a web development company. They have no love for browser fragmentation; it means multiple environments they have to develop and test for.

As an end user technology it was always DOA except in very nerdy niche's. As a delivery technology I think we'll see it around for a long time to come. Users clamour for "native" apps, this is a cheap (fake) way to give it to them.

A few years ago, I managed to inherit some laptops that were being thrown out by the company my father was working for at the time.

One of them, apparently, used to be used by the CEO, and had Flock installed on it. This was my first introduction to the browser.

Joel Spolsky pithily summarized the argument: http://akkartik.name/blog/12342736

I think its bad news. If Zynga, the biggest maker of social games do not want a social browser, maybe this means something. Or not... See when Zynga aquired the Flock team, the rumors where that they want to get the senior team of flock, and make them work for zynga. http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/05/zynga-flock/ So now is just the annoucement of something that was already dead.

Bad. It proves RockMelt doesn't solve a pain-point.

No exceptions!

I have to agree with you. When it comes to design, Flock was the anti-Chrome: a huge number of sidebars and tiny icons, all screaming "Look at me!"

They recommended a platform rather than an alternative browser. Flock was initially built on Firefox and it later switched to Chrome.