Did You Know….
March 23, 2007 by Mark Evans
Filed under Business
that most of Flock’s R&D is done in Canada – Victoria, B.C. to be precise. The development work is being done by some folks who used to work for Mercurial Communications, a software development shop that did a lot of work on recent versions of the Netscape browser until AOL decided to end the relationship. With a keen interest and lots of experience in the browser space, Mercurial jumped on the Flock bandwagon last year.
This isn’t true.
Mercurial Communications does not develop for Flock.
Not to burst your bubble, but most of the Flock folks in Victoria are Mercurial *expatriates(. There is no active relationship between Mercurial and Flock, nor has there even been one. (It would have been a breach of contract for Mercurial to work on another browser so soon after Netscape 8.0). The fact that Victoria hosts the largest concentration of Mozilla developers outside of the Bay Area is purely coincidental.
Mercurial might have the talent level in-house to build a *website that could be viewed in Netscape or Flock. Maybe. But build a browser? No way. Those days, and all the staff who could do it, are long, long gone from Mercurial. Flock just happens to use folks from the same city, and yes many of them used to work at Mercurial before they gleefully fled the bungling ownership.