Flock Ditching Firefox, Moving To Google Chrome
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Nevermind the regression of features that Firefox has which Chrome doesn't. Seems like a lot of work to me.
Most likely Techcrunch just up to it's usual ways: authoritative headlines with mysterious, anonymous sources. Oh, and with this nugget thrown in at the end: Flock hasn’t yet returned a request for comment on this story.
Mike,
I was responding to your email from only a few hours ago when I saw your article. It’s important to clarify a couple of things. We haven’t ceased development efforts on the Mozilla platform. Our upcoming release of Flock 2.1 is built on the Mozilla platform. Having said that, the browser space is heating up, and we’ve seen a variety of exciting technologies emerge over the last several months that are appealing.
We always have and will continue to make architectural decisions that balance what’s best for our users and what’s best for Flock as a business. This has resulted in a healthy, growing user base and business for Flock, and we expect this to continue in 2009. In fact, with over seven million downloads almost entirely from word of mouth, Flock enjoys a highly satisfied user base with consistently over 92% customer satisfaction, very strong net promoter scores, and an average of four hours of usage per day.
With a continuing focus on user-centered browser innovation, our team is in active research and development on a range of exciting new enhancements to Flock. It is still far too early to comment on anything specific, but we are very excited about this design phase…
The response isn't exactly straightforward, but sketchy job on the part of TechCrunch. I think the story has some value, but it certainly isn't 100% truthful.
Most of the code isn't UI, it is JS. JS which is portable to other browsers and which would benefit from not running in a single thread. The IPC model of Chrome is much nicer for extension development. Porting many of the components is not as hard as you would think.
Next, some of the GUI is XUL, some of it is HTML. Converting between XUL and HTML isn't as hard as you would think. The box models are different, but both use CSS for style. I have several extensions and had to convert between XUL and HTML and back when I cannot figure out how to override browser.js stuff. Not that big of a deal.
There is a degree of "version 2, lets rebuild the whole thing," but I don't think they are going to change on the drop of the hat. Their open SVN repository shows that even while they have been working on new releases of the firefox based browser, they have been doing experiments with chrome to figure out how it would work.
Their VP of E before building Flock lead the team that build Netscape 8/9 (it was outsourced), and I have faith that if he changes to Chromium it is because it is the smart thing to do.
"it didn't work at first iteration, we burn a few million dollars... no worries! Let's rewrite the whole thing and pray... again"
Having raised 30 million (most of which I assume is still in the bank or they're really doing something wrong) they should have plenty of time to explore new options. If the Google Chrome angle is real, then they'll have to re-implement all the work they've done on Flock so far ... from scratch.
Ah well, whatever. I never understood their business model anyway.
Really? Mozilla makes millions a year just from Google Search referrals. http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrati...