The Flock FlapThe Flock Flap

Dealing with rumors and gossip is like nailing jelly to the wall. The right (wrong?) ones take on a patina of truth they don't deserve, just because they sound right or we feel they should be right. Consider the recent blog-buzz about whether or not social-networking Web browser Flock, a Firefox-derived product, is going to ditch its Mozilla base and switch instead to Google Chrome because of poor support from the Moz side.

I use Flock. A lot. It's become the standard way I deal with Flickr (which I love), Twitter and Facebook (which I am forced to tolerate because, well, everyone else uses them), and a whole avalanche of feeds. You can bet I'd have a good reason to be curious as to whether or not they would be changing the underlying technology used in their browser.

That wouldn't be a trivial thing. It would mean breaking from the entire Mozilla ecosystem, with all of its plugins and APIs and other things that make life and browsing easier -- trading all of that up for a platform which is still in a 1.x incarnation (and doesn't even have a working plug-in system yet, come to think of it).

And yet a number of different outlets have all been pointing to an article by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch, wherein he cites unnamed sources who claim that the Flocksters are getting frustrated by the way the Mozilla team isn't giving them the support they feel they need. Flock's CEO, Shawn Hardin, later chimed in and started that no, they hadn't ditched Mozilla, but that the browser space was "heating up" and "we've seen a variety of exciting technologies emerge over the last several months that are appealing" -- exactly the kind of vague language that causes rumor-mill readers to turn cartwheels.

I'm not buying it -- not only because rumors are a dime a dozen, but because Firefox is hardly past its prime in terms of what people are using. It's easy to forget that this whole business of "what browser will rule them all" is something that takes place mostly in the minds of pundits and programmers, and not users. Chrome, as sleek and minimal as it is, doesn't yet have the same world of functionality around it that Firefox / Mozilla does. Still ... give it a year, and who knows? By that time, I'd be more willing to bet whatever problems Moz and Flock have with each other will be ironed out in a far less dramatic way.

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