Flock Browser

meet new Flock

We're excited to launch the new Flock social Web browser today. We’ve invested a year in talking to consumers and learning from our existing community. We took that information and executed on a vision of how to make the social Web more accessible and useful for a broad set of users. After all, the social Web isn’t bleeding edge any longer. It’s pretty much everyone. But of course, getting from consumer input and Flock vision to design is another matter. We marshaled our browser experts and evaluated the new technologies available to us. Our goal was to build a state of the art social browser and a platform for meaningful innovation going forward.

Flock’s users (about 8 million of them to date) have taught us a great deal. They taught us that what we are trying to do is valid and important to them, and at the same time they have taught us what isn't working as well as it should. We’ve heard, loud and clear, that performance and reliability are really important. We've also learned that valuable features aren't all that valuable when there are too many of them, presented together in a crowded user interface. Complexity isn't helpful.

We also saw the social Web landscape changing. What was once a niche market of Web enthusiasts is now a set of mainstream behaviors that an unprecedented number of people interact with every day. The predictions about a Web of streams replacing a Web of pages have come true and given rise to both a new way of enjoying the Web and a new set of challenges. It should be easy to integrate the Web -- especially the social Web -- into our lives in a meaningful way. It should enrich our lives without taxing our increasingly limited free time or attention.

Many people, myself included, discover most things via the Web today. These discoveries almost always come as a result of content being shared, either passively in a stream we consume, or actively from a specific person. I don't get emails with links in them much anymore (except from my mum). Instead I now have seemingly endless streams of entertaining media, interesting facts, updates about people I care about and people I admire, and current events in various areas of interest -- all available whenever I care to consume it. The Web used to be about searching for what I want to discover, but now it's increasingly about discovering what is there to be discovered, in the moment, and deciding if I want to lean in and consume it. The social Web makes this work because I instantly gauge how likely I am to be interested in content by seeing who is providing it to me. If I'm busy, I'm not going to click the link from a funny person, but if I need a break and want to surf, I'm going to grab that opportunity, click and consume. (And if it's really funny or interesting, click again and share it along, adding my commentary to those who follow me.) Again, all of this has to be easy, if not effortless, if it's going to enrich my life rather than slow me down by adding more tool requirements to my full schedule.

Aside from making it simple, the next challenge that comes with the flow is making it less random. The stream is unfathomably broad. Control has to be as easy as flipping or “surfing” through TV channels. Sometimes I’m happy to consume whatever is in front of me when I feel like consuming something, but even rudimentary controls go a long way in taking my experience from good to great, and making that repeatable. I don't want to spend a bunch of time configuring tools or managing my Web experience -- I want to turn it on, give it some kind of information about what mood I am in, and get the payoff. This is largely what the new Flock browser lets me do. As a bonus I consume and interact with people the same way I do with content feeds in new Flock. That's pretty much all I need to stay informed and socially active as a regular part of my day.

When we combined the user feedback about 'less is more' with the vision of being able to extract the parts of the stream most likely to suit my fancy at any given time, we came up with new Flock. Now I channel surf the Web. I made the channels that reflect my own categorization of the people and content I follow, and I flip between them with a click as I carry on with my day. And our new social search capability makes it easy to find information from my social stream. It’s something only Flock can do.

The last remaining challenge we had to face to get this started was "how, exactly, are we going to pull this off?" We had already pushed the technologies we were using about as far as we could, and we needed to make things much faster. Enter chromium.org, the next step in the evolution of the Web browser. The technologies that make up Chromium let us push much farther than before, and package our vision into rocketship-fast software. There isn't a limit to what we can do on this platform (which is fantastic, as we have a lot of things we still want to do!)

I also want to take this opportunity to mention Mozilla, and basically take my hat off while I'm at it. Most of the Flock team started building browsers on Mozilla in late 2004, before Firefox 1.0 was released (we built Netscape 8.x together, which was Firefox-based, before working on Flock 1.x). As we start this new chapter with Chromium, it seems important to mention that I believe chromium.org would not even exist had mozilla.org not come before it. We didn't choose Chromium over Mozilla as much as we chose Chromium after Mozilla. It was a natural evolution. I see Mozilla as a venerable deity in the space, and I feel thankful for everything its enabled.

The road ahead for the new Flock is tremendously exciting to us; we have a more innovative and promising roadmap than we've ever had before. I hope you like this first incarnation and I look forward to learning more from you as we keep innovating so we can all get more from the social Web.