H-Online: In a post on their home page, the Flock developers have announced that support for their Chromium-based social web browser will officially be discontinued on 26 April 2011. Thanking their “loyal users” for their support, the developers encourage the Flock community to migrate to another browser.
Flock began life as a cross-platform browser start-up in April 2005. Distinguishing itself from other browsers, Flock automatically managed updates and media from several popular social services, including MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Digg, YouTube and Twitter.
Prior to version 3.x, the browser was based on Mozilla’s Gecko HTML rendering engine, the same used by the 3.x branch of Firefox. However, when the Flock 3 beta arrived, it dropped the engine used by Firefox and switched to Google’s open source Chromium browser platform. The last major update to Flock was version 3.5 from late November 2010; three point updates were later released to address various bugs.
In January of this year, the company was acquired by US game maker Zynga, which is well known for it’s popular online games, such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars. While users can continue to use the browser, the company notes that several “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”.
As no further security updates will be provided, the developers encourage all Flock users to upgrade to either Google Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. An Official End of Support FAQ is available on the company’s web site.