

Flock Ditching Firefox, Moving To Google Chrome - thepanister
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/02/flock-ditching-firefox-moving-to-google-chrome/

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evdawg
Wouldn't this mean a lot of extra, cross-platform development of the "Flock
enhanced" features? Wouldn't they have to re-develop all of these features for
each platform's GUI toolkit, instead of just a single XUL codebase?

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._

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anotherjesse
I used to be the lead dev at flock - I've not worked there for almost 2 years
now, but I talk to several of the developers regularly. I don't know what
their business plans are but:

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.

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herval
If there are two products I think I'll never understand the motivation, those
are Flock and Cuil.

"it didn't work at first iteration, we burn a few million dollars... no
worries! Let's rewrite the whole thing and pray... again"

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mpk
Flock is built on Mozilla using XUL. As far as I can tell (and I really
haven't done my homework on this) Google Chrome doesn't have this kind of
extensible architecture.

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.

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jorgeortiz85
_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...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/28/mozilla-extends-lucrative-
deal-with-google-for-3-years/)

~~~
herval
But will Flock ever get achieve populatity to make at least a few millions?

