Back in early November, we reported the launch of RockMelt – the Chrome powered social web browser.
This week brings news of a big competitor – Flock, version 3.5.
Many of you would have already heard of Flock and may even use it as your primary browser, after all, it’s been around since 2005. Much like RockMelt, Flock is known for its social networking elements.
The new version of Flock, ‘Flock 3.5’ sees a number of improvements including added functionality and increased speed. The major improvement is that Flock is now based off of Chromium 7, an upgrade from Flock 3.0’s Chromium 5 roots.
Flock’s Mac version is also now based on Chromium; the previous version ran off of Gecko – which is what FireFox runs on.
Flock is clearly aware of the threat that RockMelt poses. So much so that it’s created a 24 point comparison chart, ‘Flock vs RockMelt’;
Here’s a few points form the chart;
- “Sharing is multi-click and cumbersome. You have to click the Share button — pick what you want from a drop down box. Several clicks are involved — up to three clicks.”
- “We think RockMelt will be difficult for average users to use, given the configuration and clicking required. Three years of user testing and input has told us that they don’t want to go to all this work in their social browser and they don’t want to open up multiple windows to see what’s going on. They want to see what’s important to them in a glance.”
- “RockMelt’s search experience is cumbersome and it doesn’t give you all the goodness of Google. RockMelt has added a Firefox era-like features of two search boxes — you put something in search box, a panel pops up that just gives you Google results in a panel without taking you to Google. This introduces a pop up window on top of Google and duplicates functionality already available from Google.”
Clearly, Flock isn’t about to surrender to RockMelt just yet. This is just the start of the social browser wars…
