Flock, the browser that specialized in providing social networking directly in its user interface, has been discontinued. An "Official End of Support Notice" has been posted to the company's website:

Support for Flock browsers will be discontinued as of April 26th, 2011. We would like to thank our loyal users around the world for their support, and we encourage the Flock community to migrate in the coming weeks to one of the recommended web browsers listed below.

Frankly, Flock never stood a chance at gaining significant market share, but it was quite the interesting piece of software, especially for those interested in using multiple social networks. Five years ago, we even interviewed Flock co-founder Geoffrey Arone about his initiative.

Flock was first released on April 11, 2005. Early versions of Flock used the Gecko HTML rendering engine by Mozilla, but version 2.6.2, released in July 2010, was the last of its kind. As of version 3, Flock was based on Chromium and so used the WebKit rendering engine. Flock was available as a free download for Windows and Mac OS X (at one point there was also a Linux flavor).

Given its roots, we're not too surprised that Flock is recommending its users to switch to either Chrome or Firefox. Both are updated much more regularly, with new versions released just last month: Chrome 10 and Firefox 4. Will you miss Flock?