Flock Breaks Up with Mozilla, is Now BFFs with Google

Posted 06/16/2010 at 6:45am | by Paul Lilly

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For the first time ever, the social Web browser called Flock is turning to Google's Chromium project to provide the architecture for its next major release. Currently in beta form, the new Chromium-inspired Flock represents a complete redesign, and is the first social browser built on Google's platform.

"Our interactions with people online have changed everything about the way we discover, shop, work and play," said Shawn Hardin, CEO of Flock. "The new Flock is designed to naturally complement the value we place in relationships and puts you at the center of your friends and their conversations while you browse the Web. Conventional browsers like Internet Explorer and Safari aren’t built to bring together the conversations and content that matter to each user. Flock is the only browser with the best of the social Web built-in."

Previous versions of Flock, including the latest stable release, have all been powered by Mozilla and built around Firefox, so why make the change to Chromium? According to Flock's development team, "there are lots of reasons why... and the main ones are the thoughtful architecture, the elegance of the underlying code, and the incredible speed of the browser."

Flock claims its new beta starts up instantly and loads pages and complex Internet apps much faster than either IE or Firefox. During our limited test drive, we found this to be generally true, although there are still some kinks to be ironed out - our icon on Maximum PC, for example, wouldn't load in the Flock beta (see screenshot below).

Any potential bugs aside, the overhauled Flock browser will come as a welcome change to social networking nuts who have grown fond of Google's Chrome browser. Flock supports numerous social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, all seamlessly integrated.

More info and download instructions here.