It was billed as the “social browser” but it never found enough friends; ‘Flock’ web-browser will be formally discontinued on April 26th this year, an announcement on the company’s website reads.
The news is likely to be of no great shock or surprise to anyone – the last time we mentioned it on OMG! Ubuntu! was way back in April 28, 2009 - as the browser, despite having boasting Linux-support from its launch 5 years ago, never quite found a foot hold amongst Linux users the way later browsers such as Chromium did.
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.
So why now?
An FAQ provided by Flock provides the details: –
“The Flock team joined Zynga in January, 2011 and is now working to assist Zynga in achieving their goal of building the most fun, social games available to anyone, anytime — on any platform.
Flock will no longer be actively maintained, which means you can keep using the product, but key features will stop working after 4/26/11 and over time the browser will no longer be secure as software updates and upgrades will no longer be provided.”