Flock was a web browser that specialized in providing social networking and Web 2.0 facilities built into its user interface.^[3] Earlier versions of Flock used the Gecko HTML rendering engine by Mozilla. Version 2.6.2, released in July 2010, was the last version based on Mozilla Firefox.^[4][5] Starting with version 3, Flock was based on Chromium and so used the WebKit rendering engine.^[6][7] Flock was available as a free download, and supported Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X platforms (previously also Linux).

Support for Flock was discontinued in April 2011. A year later in April 2012 the old Flock website was back and carried a vague indication that the project might be resurrected, inviting readers to sign up for e-mailed future news.^[8][9][10]

History[link]

Flock was the successor to Round Two, who raised money from Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and other angel investors. Bart Decrem and Geoffrey Arone co-founded the company.^[11] Flock raised $15 million in a fourth round of funding led by Fidelity Ventures on May 22, 2008.^{[citation needed]} The company's previous investors, Bessemer Venture Partners, Catamount Ventures, and Shasta Ventures, also participated in the round. "The company plans to use the funds to expand its research and development, marketing, and global expansion efforts. To date, the company has raised an estimated $30 million", according to its press release.^[12]

Flock was one of the 12 browsers offered to European Economic Area users of Microsoft Windows in 2010.^[13]

In January 2011, Flock Inc. was acquired by Zynga.^[14] The browser has been discontinued, with support ending April 26, 2011.^[2]

In April 2012, Flock.com posted a page with a quote from Mark Twain stating, "The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." and provided an email address sign up, indicating a possible return of the Flock web browser.^[10]

Features[link]

Flock 2.5 integrated social networking and media services including MySpace,^[15] Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Blogger, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.^[16] Notably, when logging into any of the supported social services, Flock can track updates from friends: profiles, uploaded photos, and more. Flock's latest 2.5 version added Twitter Search functionality, multi-casting of status updates to multiple services, and the introduction of instant messaging via Facebook Chat in the browser.

Other features include:

• native sharing of text, links, photos and videos;^[17]
• a "Media Bar" showing preview of online videos and photos as well as subscription to photo and video feeds;^[18][7]
• a feed reader supporting Atom, RSS, and Media RSS^[15] feeds;^[19]
• a blog editor and reader, allowing direct posting into any designated blog;^[20]
• a Webkit-mail component allowing users to check supported web-based email off site, compose new messages, and drag-and-drop pictures and videos from the "Media Bar" or webclipboard into a new email message;^[21]
• support for third-party add-ons, including a number of Firefox extensions.^[22][7]

Reception[link]

• Download.com rated it 5 out of 5 ^[23]
• Ranked no. 6 on PC World's list of the 100 best products of 2008 ^[24][25]

In December 2007, Flock won the Mashable Open Web Awards for Applications and Widgets^[26] and in March 2008, Flock won the South By Southwest^[27] Web Award for Community.^[28]

CNET gave the Mac OS X version of Flock 1.0 the title of "Best Mac Software of 2007".^[29] PC World's Harry McCracken reviewed Flock as his "New Favorite Web Browser".^[30]

In February 2008, AOL announced that it would discontinue support for the Netscape browser, and recommended Flock and Firefox as alternative browsers to its userbase of Netscape 9 users.^[31] For the Netscape 8 userbase, AOL recommended only the Flock browser to its users.^[32] In March 2008, Flock announced that they had seen "nearly 3 million downloads" and a 135% percent increase in active users in the first two months of 2008. They also announced "more than 70 percent of Flock users making it their default browser of choice".^[33]

In May 2008, Flock won the Social Networking category of the Webby Awards.^[34][35] Flock was nominated for this award along with Facebook, Bebo and Ning.

In April 2011 when Flock's discontinuation was announced, reviewer Joey Sneddon of OMG! Ubuntu! offered the analysis: "Whether this was down to poor implementation design wise (one needs only glance at ‘Rockmelt’ for an example of a social browser done right) or just general apathy towards having alerts from twitter, flickr, facebook, digg et al in your face all of the time is moot: Flock has flocked off and for all its innovation it never quite lived up to its own hype."^[8]

Awards[link]

Upon exiting beta, Flock won a number of awards:^[23]

• Webby Award in social networking, 2008^[24]
• SXSW community Award, 2008 ^[23][24]
• Open Web Award for Applications and Widgets, 2007 ^[23]

• "Eddy Winner": Flock 2.0 24th Annual Macworld Editors' Choice Awards ^[36]

See also[link]

	Software portal
	Free software portal

• Comparison of feed aggregators
• Comparison of web browsers
• List of feed aggregators
• List of web browsers
• RockMelt, competitive social web browser

References[link]

External links[link]

• Flock Web site

Look up flock in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Flock or flocking may refer to:

Computing[link]

• Flock (web browser), a defunct web browser
• Flock system call, used for computer file locking
• F-Lock, a function lock key on a computer keyboard

Entertainment[link]

• Flock (sculpture), a sculpture by Michael Christian
• Flock (album), the third album by Irish band Bell X1
• The Flock (band), a 1969–1970 progressive rock band fronted by violinist Jerry Goodman
  • The Flock (album), by The Flock
• The Flock (film), a film starring Richard Gere
• The Flock, a novel by James Robert Smith
• Flock!, a 2009 video game published by Capcom
• Raven's Nest, a professional wrestling stable alternatively called The Flock

People[link]

• Bob Flock (1918–1964), one of the Flock brother pioneers of NASCAR stock-car racing
• Fonty Flock (1920–1972), one of the Flock brother pioneers of NASCAR stock-car racing
• Tim Flock (1924–1998), one of the Flock brother pioneers of NASCAR stock-car racing

Science[link]

• Flocking agent, in chemistry, a substance added to a fluid to remove suspended particles
• Flocking (behavior), the collective motion of a large number of self-propelled entities
• Flock, a collective noun for various animal groups:
  • Flock (birds), a group of birds
  • Flock, a herd of sheep, goats or similar animals
  • Flock, a crowd of people
• Species flock, a diverse group of closely related species in an isolated area

Other[link]

• Flock, the congregation of a Christian local church
• Flock, wool or cotton fiber stuffing in furniture and matresses
• Flocking (texture), or modeling flock, the material and process of adding small particles to a surface for the sake of texture

See also[link]

• Flock Bronzewing or Flock Pigeon (Phaps histrionica), an Australian species of bird
• Congregation (disambiguation)
• Flocke, a female polar bear
• Phlox
• All pages beginning with "Flock"
• All pages with titles containing "Flock"

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Web browser usage on Wikimedia servers

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content.^[1] Hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to navigate their browsers to related resources. A web browser can also be defined as an application software or program designed to enable users to access, retrieve and view documents and other resources on the Internet.

Although browsers are primarily intended to access the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by web servers in private networks or files in file systems. The major web browsers are Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari.^[2]

History[link]

WorldWideWeb for NeXT, released in 1991, was the first web browser.^[3]

The first web browser was invented in 1990 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It was called WorldWideWeb (no spaces) and was later renamed Nexus.^[4]

In 1993, browser software was further innovated by Marc Andreessen with the release of Mosaic (later Netscape), "the world's first popular browser",^[5] which made the World Wide Web system easy to use and more accessible to the average person. Andreesen's browser sparked the internet boom of the 1990s.^[5] The introduction of Mosaic in 1993 – one of the first graphical web browsers – led to an explosion in web use. Andreessen, the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, soon started his own company, named Netscape, and released the Mosaic-influenced Netscape Navigator in 1994, which quickly became the world's most popular browser, accounting for 90% of all web use at its peak (see usage share of web browsers).

Marc Andreessen

Microsoft responded with its Internet Explorer in 1995, also heavily influenced by Mosaic, initiating the industry's first browser war. Bundled with Windows, Internet Explorer gained dominance in the web browser market; Internet Explorer usage share peaked at over 95% by 2002.^[6]

Opera debuted in 1996; although it has never achieved widespread use, having less than 2% browser usage share as of February 2012 according to Net Applications.^[7] Its Opera-mini version has an additive share, in April 2011 amounting to 1.1% of overall browser use, but focused on the fast-growing mobile phone web browser market, being preinstalled on over 40 million phones. It is also available on several other embedded systems, including Nintendo's Wii video game console.

In 1998, Netscape launched what was to become the Mozilla Foundation in an attempt to produce a competitive browser using the open source software model. That browser would eventually evolve into Firefox, which developed a respectable following while still in the beta stage of development; shortly after the release of Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, Firefox (all versions) accounted for 7% of browser use.^[6] As of August 2011, Firefox has a 28% usage share.^[7]

Apple's Safari had its first beta release in January 2003; as of April 2011, it had a dominant share of Apple-based web browsing, accounting for just over 7% of the entire browser market.^[7]

The most recent major entrant to the browser market is Google's Chrome, first released in September 2008. Chrome's take-up has increased significantly year on year, by doubling its usage share from 8% to 16% by August 2011. This increase seems largely to be at the expense of Internet Explorer, whose share has tended to decrease from month to month.^[8] In December 2011, Google Chrome overtook Internet Explorer 8 as the most widely used web browser.^[clarify] However, when all versions of Internet Explorer are put together, IE is still most popular.^[9]

Function[link]

The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user. This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), for example http://en.wikipedia.org/, into the browser. The prefix of the URL, the Uniform Resource Identifier or URI, determines how the URL will be interpreted. The most commonly used kind of URI starts with http: and identifies a resource to be retrieved over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such as https: for HTTPS, ftp: for the File Transfer Protocol, and file: for local files. Prefixes that the web browser cannot directly handle are often handed off to another application entirely. For example, mailto: URIs are usually passed to the user's default e-mail application, and news: URIs are passed to the user's default newsgroup reader.

In the case of http, https, file, and others, once the resource has been retrieved the web browser will display it. HTML is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup to an interactive document. Aside from HTML, web browsers can generally display any kind of content that can be part of a web page. Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and XML files, and often have plug-ins to support Flash applications and Java applets. Upon encountering a file of an unsupported type or a file that is set up to be downloaded rather than displayed, the browser prompts the user to save the file to disk.

Information resources may contain hyperlinks to other information resources. Each link contains the URI of a resource to go to. When a link is clicked, the browser navigates to the resource indicated by the link's target URI, and the process of bringing content to the user begins again.

Features[link]

Available web browsers range in features from minimal, text-based user interfaces with bare-bones support for HTML to rich user interfaces supporting a wide variety of file formats and protocols. Browsers which include additional components to support e-mail, Usenet news, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), are sometimes referred to as "Internet suites" rather than merely "web browsers".^[10][11][12]

All major web browsers allow the user to open multiple information resources at the same time, either in different browser windows or in different tabs of the same window. Major browsers also include pop-up blockers to prevent unwanted windows from "popping up" without the user's consent.^{[13][14][15][16]}

Most web browsers can display a list of web pages that the user has bookmarked so that the user can quickly return to them. Bookmarks are also called "Favorites" in Internet Explorer. In addition, all major web browsers have some form of built-in web feed aggregator. In Firefox, web feeds are formatted as "live bookmarks" and behave like a folder of bookmarks corresponding to recent entries in the feed.^[17] In Opera, a more traditional feed reader is included which stores and displays the contents of the feed.^[18]

Furthermore, most browsers can be extended via plug-ins, downloadable components that provide additional features.

User interface[link]

Most major web browsers have these user interface elements in common:^[19]

• Back and forward buttons to go back to the previous resource and forward respectively.
• A refresh or reload button to reload the current resource.
• A stop button to cancel loading the resource. In some browsers, the stop button is merged with the reload button.
• A home button to return to the user's home page.
• An address bar to input the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) of the desired resource and display it.
• A search bar to input terms into a search engine. In some browsers, the search bar is merged with the address bar.
• A status bar to display progress in loading the resource and also the URI of links when the cursor hovers over them, and page zooming capability.

Major browsers also possess incremental find features to search within a web page.

Privacy and security[link]

Most browsers support HTTP Secure and offer quick and easy ways to delete the web cache, cookies, and browsing history. For a comparison of the current security vulnerabilities of browsers, see comparison of web browsers.Browsers should also be very secure, as malware is a constant threat on the internet.

Standards support[link]

Early web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The rapid development of proprietary web browsers led to the development of non-standard dialects of HTML, leading to problems with interoperability. Modern web browsers support a combination of standards-based and de facto HTML and XHTML, which should be rendered in the same way by all browsers.

Extensibility[link]

A browser extension is a computer program that extends the functionality of a web browser. Every major web browser supports the development of browser extensions.

See also[link]

• Geobrowsing
• List of web browsers
• Mobile browser
• Timeline of web browsers
• Web browser history

References[link]

External links[link]

• Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One
• Existing browsers
• WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project