When it first came out in 2005, the Flock browser was a Mozilla/Firefox derivative with a novel difference: a RSS, and later social-network, sidebar that allowed users to keep one eye on feeds while continuing their usual web browsing, and also featured drag-and-drop photo uploading. Today, such mashups take many other forms — from menu items to plug-ins — but the basic idea has proven popular. Back in January, CEO Sean Hardin announced that the Flock team would move over to the social-network gaming company Zynga and that development would be halted. Today, the company officially posted notice of the end of support effective April 26th.
“We would like to thank all our loyal users around the world for their support, and we encourage the Flock community to migrate … to one of the recommended web browsers … since no further security updates will be provided to keep you safe on the web” the company said in a statement, suggesting either Firefox or Google’s Chrome.
Over its history, the company raised some $30 million in funding and won several design awards for its innovations. It discontinued development shortly after switching from a Mozilla web-engine base to a Chromium/WebKit base last summer. At it’s height, Flock supported being logged into, monitoring and updating Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube and various RSS feeds simultaneously and boasted 10 million users.
