It’s true that Flock and Firefox are both web browsers, so we compete with Firefox in the same way that we compete with say Internet Explorer or Opera. However Firefox is also at the guts of Flock. This means that Flock would not exist, at least in the form as we know it, without the hard work and dedication put forth by the Mozilla community. We are now beginning to offer code and resources back to Mozilla, as a community member such as ourselves ought to do when possible.

While we both build web browsers, we build them for very different audiences. Firefox is meant to be a great browser for all people, and extensible and customizable through add-ons such as extensions, language packs, dictionaries and themes. Flock has a more specialized feature set, targeted towards folks who frequently use popular web services such a Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or Livejournal. Where Firefox makes more sense for a company like IBM to install on thousands of corporate laptops, Flock may make sense for your personal machine, or for your personal use. In a way, we are making complimentary products built off the same foundation.

In short, it makes no sense for there to be any animosity between us, since more Gecko-based browsers in the world showing up in site access_logs, be they Firefox, Flock, Netscape, SeaMonkey or Camino, can only be a good thing for the web.