Umm… Flock?

I don’t get Flock. I really don’t. I’ve tried and tried to get it, but I just can’t. It makes no sense to me.

I can understand how the Mozilla Corporation can earn money to support itself through search agreements and the like, but how can another company steal use 90% of Firefox’s code, create a “new” browser, and attempt to generate buzz and money from it. Considering the following quote, I’m at a loss:

We’ve actually been pretty certain for some time that most of the features that we build into Flock will be eventually be ported back over to Firefox as extensions.

I’m sorry… what? So you expect most features to go back to Firefox? Why would any VC support you? I can see why a VC might support Mozilla and Firefox, but not Flock. It almost seems to me that these boys (and a couple women) are simply using the latest “Web 2.0″ craze to take advantage of poor, ignorant venture capitalists. Let’s see… no ads, open source browser, no real revenue (as far as I can tell)… how do you plan to make money again?

It seems like it’d be much more useful to put these features into Firefox from the start. I’m not saying I like all the features (or any of them), but that’s much more reasonable than what they’re currently doing.

(Side note: With Camino, we’ve always held the stance that creating a browser connection with a third party web application is a Bad Thing. Should that web application disappear, or change significantly, all of our users would lose whichever feature we implement. [I'm looking at you del.icio.us.])

I’m of the mindset that yes, Flock Sucks.