Hardin acknowledged that the bigger browsers could step up their social game. "I certainly expect that the major players will all be looking to serve the [same] social audience," he said.

Flock doesn't even register in the data compiled by Web analytics firms such as Net Applications, said Vince Vizzaccaro, the company's vice president of marketing, since like RockMelt, Flock is actually a customized version of Chromium, the open-source browser project that Google backs. Chromium, which is based on Apple's WebKit engine, is also the foundation for Google's Chrome.

"[RockMelt and Flock] are not broad or universal products," said Hilwa. "They taking the browser, then customizing it to manage your social networking affairs. They're as much a Facebook application as they are a browser."

Valdes went further, wondering if the browser-based strategies of RockMelt and Flock even made sense. "There is a genuine need for a better method of accessing the broad range of social sites, but a browser may not be the best approach," he said. "It requires a big download and also needs to be updated frequently to keep up with the rapid evolution of social sites."

And the difficulty every browser developer has in convincing users to switch is also at play, Hilwa said. Firefox, for instance, has acquired less than a quarter of the browser market in its six years of butting heads with IE.