The browser wars are heating up this week, with Flock delivering a blow with its move away from Firefox and towards Chrome. After six years with Firefox, the socially-enhanced Flock browser will be using Chromium, the open source code project for the Chrome browser. But why, exactly, is that such a big deal?

It hints at the changing landscape of browsers, and the ongoing desire to be the best interface for accessing users. Browsers are still the most common way in which people interact with web content, and finding the most practical way to organize actions around that is an ever-evolving process. Just look at how many browser updates emerged in the past week.

Mozilla has begun moving forward with the development of its latest rendition, Firefox 4. And Apple released a Safari update, amongst other things related to its early summer product push. Opera has announced geo-location support as part of its major upgrades, and Microsoft unleashed Patch Tuesday, fixing a handful of critical bugs occurring in Internet Explorer.

It appears to be Google Chrome, however, that’s starting to stand out from the crowd. In true Google form, the Chrome browser began as an interesting project that eventually gained significant traction, thanks to developer interest and dedicated resources from Google. Flock is the latest to get in on the Chrome fun, with Opera and Firefox announcing support of Chrome’s WebM video technology.

With all the growing support for Chrome and a massive switch from Flock, two questions come to my mind: why Chrome, and is the social browser becoming irrelevant? There are so many apps and browser add-ons these days, it’s difficult to justify using a browser solely for its social capabilities.

Yet as Chrome slowly becomes the glue that centralizes much of Google’s branching initiatives, the browser will affect user media consumption and communication on the computer, mobile device and television. This could be an attractive platform for Flock to build upon, especially as it seeks to shake things up.

Realizing that the social web is now the web, Flock VP of Engineering Clayton Stark says this in a blog post,

“We also saw the social Web landscape changing. What was once a niche market of Web enthusiasts is now a set of mainstream behaviors that an unprecedented number of people interact with every day. The predictions about a Web of streams replacing a Web of pages have come true and given rise to both a new way of enjoying the Web and a new set of challenges. It should be easy to integrate the Web — especially the social Web — into our lives in a meaningful way. It should enrich our lives without taxing our increasingly limited free time or attention.”

As far as Flock is concerned, a move to Chrome could also mean a move towards the next iteration of social web interactions. Nearly everything we do can now be made social, thanks to cell phones and media-sharing networks. Leveraging these new standards could breath new life into the Flock browser.