The latest challenger to Explorer and Firefox aims to beat the big guys by emphasizing blogging, networking, and online communities.
Web browsers don’t look much different than they did a decade ago, when Netscape Communications’s initial stock offering catapulted software for navigating the Web into the public eye. You click on a site, look around, watch or listen to something, click somewhere else — all by your lonesome self. Now, an upstart called Flock aims to change all that.
On Oct. 5, the Palo Alto-based startup takes the wraps off what it’s calling a "social browser." Unlike plain-vanilla browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Flock’s browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn’t satisfied passively browsing media online.
Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online.
