Flock The Web 2.0 Social Browser To Be Forever In Beta?

I decided to take a look at the Browser called Flock again after a year.

Flock is a browser based on the Firefox / Mozilla Code base that was launched with a lot of Hype and internet Buzz around this time last year. I was particularly intrigued since I loved the look and feel and it felt like a refreshed Firefox running on Steroids it was labeled as a Web 2.0 The Social browser. Though even after the release of Firefox 2.0 they have not yet update the code base.

1. It is being developed by some Ex-Firefox Promoters.
2. Based on the Mozilla code base hence it is Multi platform and Open Source.
3. Great Eye-Candy Interface.
4. Inbuilt tools and support for Web 2.0 Services and blogging Platforms

Interestingly when Flock was released the Founder decrem said (He left Flock a while back).

Flock is not interested in forking the Mozilla code-base”.”Further, we don’t want to break anyone’s Firefox experience, or have our browser break, due to updates either way that have not been fully tested propagated. In the short term, that means that fewer people will play with our stuff, but over the long term we believe it’s the right way to go for us.

To the question “Why not an extensions?” He goes on to say

We want to be able to offer our users a complete end-to-end user experience, including a single browser download, an update service, technical support. the works.

So how does a open source product such as Flock profit. For one they have tied up with Yahoo with their search engine as the default for Flock also the Flock Start up page features a custom search Page using Yahoo. Similarly Photobucket has tied up Flock to release a special version of Flock where Photobucket users can upload and browser through their photos and pictures.

The initial releases for flock suffered from major memory leaks and bugs. Though the current versions are pretty stable. Flock has a lot of potential but it looks like the enthusiasm with which it was launched has slowed down or run dry, since its release I have hardly seen any new, major features. Most of their releases till this point have been only bug fixes. The features from Flock that I found most appealing were the Blog Editor which was similar to ScribeFire(previously called performancing extension) and the nifty Flickr top bar, though now I prefer ScribeFire to flock’s Blog Editor since it doesn’t load in a external window.

The Rss feed reader in flock needs a lot of work since I found it extremely slow and a huge memory hogger. The Rss feed Reader is fine for People with a few feed in the range of 20-50 but anything more than that can ruin your browsing experience I have more that 300 plus feeds .

I checked up the traffic to Flock’s website using Alexa and results are not very positive. The traffic seems to be steadily declining over the past few months, when it should be increasing considering that its a open source product.