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The Mozilla-based social networking browser that hasn’t quite gotten there gets a refresh, though the number of outstanding known issues is amazing. Thereupon, the Flock folks are brewing version 3 with the big news under the hood being the switch to Google’s WebKit-based Chromium browser engine.

Flock 2.6 (release notes) is your garden-variety maintenance update that incorporates Mozilla’s 3.0.19 patch for Firefox and fixes a Delicious login detection issue. That said, what follows in the release notes is a lot more interesting — a listing of nearly 90 know issues, ranging from real show stoppers, like broken TypePad login, to noisome problems like the inability to view images uploaded to Picassa.

Get your very own copy of Flock 2.6 here (23.2MB).

Out with the old…

That said, Flock is dumping its current Mozilla underpinnings for the Chromium (i.e. Google Chrome) browser engine. Flock 3 beta is already running on Chromium with one great big huge caveat for the rest of us — there’s no Mac version.

Of course, the irritating irony here is that Chromium is WebKit-based, an open-source browser created and maintained by our favorite fruit company — it’s the heart of both Safari and Chrome.

Considering how Mac users dominate content creation and social media — not many PCs at the big conferences, are there? — the lack of a Mac beta would seem to be a big mistake. Then again, if wanna spread like the common cold (or Farmville users), you should follow the lead of the virus and malware writers…

What’s your take?