Flock 3.5 Takes on RockMelt as the Social Web Browser War Heats Up

The social web browser market, although tiny, is becoming hotly disputed. Flock, the original social browser, feeling the pressure from the remarkably similar upstart RockMelt, has now released an updated version to take it one step ahead. Flock 3.5 is built on a newer version of Chromium and adds a couple of new features.

When Flock 3.0 was made available earlier this year, the big news was the fact that it was built on Chromium rather than Mozilla Firefox as before. This change came with a rather significant performance improvement and with a lighter frame to work with.

Flock promises to keep you in touch with all your friends and all of your interests without having to visit any site, social network, or aggregator. Everything is built into the browser.

Flock 3.5 supports Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as well as YouTube, Flickr and so on. What's more, it also enables you to stay updated by bringing in RSS feeds from your favorite blogs or sites.

All of the activity is displayed in the sidebar on the right in real-time. Of course, you can also filter all of the information by grouping friends with sites and topics in whichever way you see fit. This flexibility goes a long way since there are no restrictions on what type of sources you can group together.

Flock also enables you to easily share content, another big component of the social web. Flock 3.5 is built on Chromium 7, rather than Chromium 5 in Flock 3.0, a rather recent release and the same as the current stable Google Chrome release.

Of course, the upstart RockMelt, also based on Chromium, does pretty much the same thing, although it is focused solely on Facebook for the moment.

But the Flock team has come up with a number of reasons, 24 to be exact, to show why Flock is better than RockMelt and made them available via a public Google Docs spreadsheet.

Flock 3.5 is available for download here.