September 23, 2003
Camino
Camino (formally known as Chimera) is a gecko based browser from the creators of Mozilla. The original intention of Camino was to be a fast cocoa browser for Mac OS X without the bogginess of the Mozilla Suite.
Camino achieves this very well, but lacks cool features such as Extensions and Themes that is available with the more popular Mozilla FireBird Browser.
On the plus side, Camino sports features such Tabbing, User-Customizable Stylesheets, and several more features.
Still, when compared to Firebird, Camino is quite far behind. Extensions help make Firebird a supreme browser in terms of usability.
However, I've found Firebird to be a bit slower compared to Camino, but both aren't able to match the speed of Apple's Safari browser coincidently enough, authored by Dave Hyatt who used to be a developer for Mozilla.
Camino is currently at version 0.7, but it appears development might be on halt, since Mozilla was cut-off from AOL Time Warner few months back. In the removal, Mozilla lost its Mac Development Desktop.
UPDATE:As corrected by Asa in the comments, the desktop machine that was lost, was an automated nightly build machine. Development of Camino is still underway, hopefully we will see a newer version come out soon.
Either way, Camino is a good browser to have around if the other browsers such as Safari, Internet Explorer or Omniweb don't seem to render a page right. Camino's use of the gecko engine makes it a more reliable web experience, and this will come in handy for Web Developers all over.
Posted by Jasmeet at September 23, 2003 03:33 PMWe didn't exactly lose our Mac Development Desktop. That makes it sound like we had one Mac developer machine and that's not the case. One particular developer's mostly unused desktop was acting as the build machine making daily automated builds of Mac Mozilla Firebird. We lost that one machine. It had nothing to do with Camino and it wasn't even being used for development, just build automation. We've still got developers working on Mac, making Firebird, Camino and the Mozilla application suite better.
--Asa
Posted by: Asa at September 24, 2003 11:59 PM