Flock was that short‑lived “social browser” from the mid‑2000s that tried to make surfing the web feel like hanging out with your friends online. Launched in 2005 on a fork of Firefox’s Gecko engine, Flock baked in social media before it was cool—think built‑in Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and later Twitter feeds right in your sidebar. By 2007, version 1.0 officially dropped, and in 2010 they switched over to Chromium for version 3.0, chasing speed and Chrome’s market share. It was basically the browser for people who lived on social networks before smartphones fully took over. AOL bought it in early 2011, and by April that year, Flock was done—servers off, support gone. It was a perfect snapshot of that era when the web felt experimental, messy, and fun.