
Camino browser reaches its end - harshal
http://caminobrowser.org/
======
cantankerous
I remember Camino running really well on my old Powerbook and also looking
great. Farewell, friend!

------
joshmoz
I worked on Camino quite a bit in the early 2000s, it was a great experience.
It's funny to think that we really felt we were contributing greatly to the
appeal of Mac OS X by providing the kind of browsing experience Apple should
have provided on the OS much earlier, given their focus on it being designed
with the Web in mind.

Eventually Mozilla hired me to help re-write the Firefox port to Mac OS X
because the product lagged so far behind Camino. Once I got deep enough into
that project my Camino contributions dropped off. Dedicated volunteers carried
on. I had forgotten that they still hadn't shut it down yet.

Anyway, congrats to Camino on the long run! It was a great option,
particularly for earlier Mac OS X users, and a joy to work on.

------
No1
A sad announcement, but the writing has been on the wall for a few years now
(specifically, since Mozilla officially dropped support for embedding[0]).

I'm only surprised they waited this long to make it official.

[0]
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embeddin...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embedding/c_NMcO-N8wo/discussion)

------
jostmey
Camino was my preferred browser on my old Macbook because it was the simplest
and most easy to use browser available. All other browsers were irritatingly
complex by comparison.

------
zachwill
Such a great browser back in the day. It was absolutely my preferred browser
of choice until Chromium came to the Mac.

------
harshal
Here is the post from the most recent maintainer on his blog:
<http://samuelsidler.com/2013/05/the-end-of-an-era/>

Thanks to all the devs who have worked on Camino over the years.

------
cmelbye
Aw. Camino was awesome back in the day. Thanks to the developers for making
the best browser for Mac at the time.

~~~
michaelrkn
+1

------
mhd
One feature Camino ha and that I really miss in other browsers is that it
displayed whether files in its download window were still there. That sounds
rather trivial, but made it a perfect "file inbox", where I could quickly see
whether I still needed to review/move a file.

And the fact that it was more in sync with the OS X desktop experience than
Firefox (back in the days; got better) _and_ Safari (brushed metal)...

Of course nowadays, a hierarchical tab sidebar is my one "exclusive" killer
feature, and as of yet only Firefox has that (via add-ons).

~~~
freehunter
Chrome does that download behavior as well. You can see if a file has been
removed from the downloads folder right from the downloads tab in Chrome.

------
officemonkey
I used Camino since the beginning and I still have it installed my old iMac
desktop. To me, it felt more like a Mac OS Browser than Safari.

I've switched my main browser from Safari to Chrome to Firefox, but I always
kept Camino around. It's going to bum me out to delete it finally.

------
Jate
Would it be such a sin to continue to use it for a while practicing safe
browsing techniques? Or am I naive to think that I can avoid being harmed
browsing trusted sites with my beloved browser?

Seemed to be a favorite for marketing campaigns thanks to it's minimal
interface.

Camino will be missed.

~~~
blibble
your primary risk would be bad networks serving up malware, which is pretty
hard to defend against

------
fuzzywalrus
I used Camino for a year or two. It wasn't much of a choice, run Omniweb or
Camino.

Anyone else remember when Camino was Chimera?

------
Tycho
I think it was the only browser that really gelled with the 'Aqua' UI style.
IE for Mac did so too, to an extent, but Camino had more advanced features.

------
ivanca
They lost such a good chance to say "Es el fin del Camino!" _(which means "Is
the end of the Road!" in Spanish)_

~~~
shrikant
Camino means road? I always thought it meant "I walk"..

~~~
jomohke
Both are correct.

\- As a noun, it means "road" ("El Camino" – "The Road").

\- As a verb, it's a conjugation of "caminar" ("to walk" or "to go"). The -o
ending makes it "I walk" or "I go".

------
gdonelli
Thank you for your contribution to the Mac community

------
wtallis
I only stopped using Camino when I became dependent on some Firefox extensions
(AdBlock, NoScript, eventually others). The big downside to Camino having a
fully native UI was that it didn't have XUL support, so no cross-compatibility
with FireFox extensions.

As soon as one of the Mac-compatible WebKit browsers can replicate the
functionality of AdBlock Plus, NoScript, and BetterPrivacy, I'll quit using
FireFox on OS X, because it's still noticeably non-native and has some
persistent annoyances.

~~~
redthrowaway
AdBlock Plus is available for Chrome and NotScripts replicates NoScript. I'm
not sure what BetterPrivacy gets you that you can't do yourself by changing
your cookie settings.

~~~
jccalhoun
Notscripts hasn't been updated since December of 2010. ScriptSafe (used to be
scriptno) is still being developed
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scriptsafe/oiigbmn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scriptsafe/oiigbmnaadbkfbmpbfijlflahbdbdgdf)

However, the author of noscript has said that it isn't technically possible to
entirely replicate all of the features of noscript on chrome because
extensions on chrome don't have the same kind of access as they do on firefox.

<http://hackademix.net/2009/12/10/why-chrome-has-no-noscript/>

------
coherentpony
I didn't even know this existed until this post happened.

~~~
racl101
I learned about it just last year and forgot about it again until today. It's
just not even much of an option if we're going to be honest, unless you want a
minimal experience.

------
kmasters
Give Opera Next a chance. I have been using it since it came out and although
it has a couple rough edges it feels more user focused than Chrome.

~~~
progrock
One rough edge is that it totally ignores my keyboard layout for keyboard
shortcuts. It appears to use the Qwerty layout for shortcuts, even under a
different layout.

(That's Opera next 12.50 on Linux, with Presto)

------
eksith
Well that marks one more end of an era. With Camino folding up and Opera going
with WebKit - Camino too was on the way to this with Gecko being out of the
question - the browser field is getting to be a one-horse race (since all the
cool kids are going with Chrome these days).

~~~
battwell
nitpick: Opera is going with Blink. Admittedly, Blink is very similar to
WebKit at the moment.

~~~
elithrar
> nitpick: Opera is going with Blink. Admittedly, Blink is very similar to
> WebKit at the moment.

Actually, Opera is leveraging _Chromium_ —not just Blink. This includes the
rendering engine (Blink), V8, networking, etc, etc.

------
pbreit
A shame the energy that went into Camino didn't go into MacFirefox.

~~~
wmf
It seems like XUL required ten times as much effort to get comparable results.

~~~
pbreit
Fine, then make XUL better on Mac. But for the love of god, don't (obviously)
waste so much precious energy on a (obvious) dead end.

~~~
stuartmorgan
XUL was only part of the problem. Camino's goal was to make a browser that was
designed for the Mac. Firefox's goal (once running on the Mac was added after
the fact) was to make a cross platform browser that ran on the Mac. That's not
just about UI toolkits, it drives basic decisions.

Firefox doesn't use Keychain because cross-platform trumped integration. Its
localization (a different download for every language, instead of one multi-
language binary like _every_ Mac app) is "wrong" for the same reason. It
doesn't integrate with the Me card in Address Book for form fill data for the
same reason. It makes you set your accept-language list manually instead of
using the identical OS-level list for the same reason. The list, some small
and some large, goes on, and it all adds up.

It affects UI behaviors too. I don't know if they eventually fixed it, but for
a while closing the last window would quit the app, which is against the
platform guidelines for a multi-window app, and was widely hated by Mac users.
The justification was that it was consistent with Windows Firefox.

Those of us who chose to work on Camino in our free time did so because it was
the product we wanted to build, and Mac Firefox was clearly never going to be
no matter how much effort we might have put into it. You can call it a waste
if you like, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who worked on
Camino who regrets the time they spent on it, or considers it a waste.

As for it being an "obvious dead end", until Gecko embedding was deprecated
there was no reason Camino couldn't have continued indefinitely. How is
developing software that many people still love and use a dead end? Not
everyone in the world views dominating the market as the definition of
success.

------
patchfx
Could they not turn the development over to the community? Put the source code
up on Github? Seems a shame to kill it off.

*I'm not a user and not sure how popular the browser is.

~~~
supercoder
<http://caminobrowser.org/contribute/>

~~~
patchfx
They should definitely add this to the frontpage.

------
racl101
You could say Camino has ...

 __* puts on shades __* Reached the end of the road!

 __* Cue the CSI theme __* YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

~~~
Domenic_S
whoa, am I on reddit now?

------
marban
Anyone still using OmniWeb these days?

~~~
ams6110
I use it on an old PowerBook G4. It's the only way to have a reasonably up-to-
date/secure browser (the other choice being TenFourFox) on PPC/Tiger Macs.

~~~
marban
+1 for TenFourFox on a G4 Cube. iCab coming second.

------
Samuel_Michon
_“Camino is not receiving security updates” “Camino reaches its end” “Camino
is no longer being developed”_

I don’t like the tone of this press release. They make it seem like they’re
not responsible for the lack of updates and that Camino died a natural death.
They didn’t offer an explanation nor did they give any advance notice. Not
very classy.

~~~
gaius
From <http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2011/#mozembedding>

_As a purely community-based open source project, no one is employed to work
on Camino; all Camino developers are volunteers, working on Camino in their
spare time, as a labor of love. While maintaining embedding in a fork of Gecko
is theoretically possible, we don’t have the manpower for a sustained effort
of that kind_

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Ah, that explains a lot. It also shows the shadow side of open source software
development: if the developers get bored, they can just up and leave. If all
the devs do so, the project is dead but there’s no one there to call it. Users
aren’t owed any explanation.

~~~
ams6110
And this differs from commercial/closed source software how? Google Reader
come to mind, as one example?

------
MatthewPhillips
Unfortunately/fortunately with browsers becoming more of an OS replacement, it
makes it rather hard if not impossible for small teams to maintain them.

~~~
asperous
My opinion is that Google/Mozila is pushing HTML5 instead of plugins not
because that's what's best for the web, but because exactly this-- it
decreases the potential for competition.

~~~
mortehu
They must be quite bad at it, because both their browsers are split into
components that can easily be reused in competing products.

~~~
No1
The whole reason Camino has been discontinued is that the components that make
it easy to reuse Gecko in their competing product were removed from Gecko.

~~~
mortehu
I'd like to see your source for that claim. At first glance it seems that
popularity of Camino, both among its developers and its users, has been
declining for years.

A big counter-example is Opera Software switching away from their own engine
to WebKit/Blink.

~~~
stuartmorgan
<http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2011/#mozembedding>

Opera has a paid staff of full-time engineers, which makes rewriting a browser
on top of a new engine a lot more feasible.

You're right in that if Camino had the developer time it had in its heyday it
might have made the jump and survived, but the end of Gecko embedding is what
made it impossible for Camino to continue to be maintained indefinitely by one
or two people.

------
fleitz
I loved Camino back in the 10.1 / 10.2 days. It was truly epic , and so much
better than the god awful IE for Mac.

~~~
GigabyteCoin
IE for Mac? That has to be an oxy moron of some sort.

~~~
dietrichepp
For a surprisingly long window of time, IE Mac was the best browser around.
Apparently, it did not share a code base with Windows IE, which explains why
IE Mac had all the features people were drooling over in 2001 like full PNG
transparency and good CSS support. PNG support even included color correction,
and IE Mac did not suffer from the "box model" bug that affected IE on
Windows.

I think the Mac version of IE had something like 99% compliance on the first
Acid test, before other browsers had robust CSS support. You could even find a
copy of the Acid test in an easter egg in the browser.

It was a fantastic browser at the time, but didn't align with Microsoft's
future interests and the development team was reassigned.

~~~
wwweston
> and IE Mac did not suffer from the "box model" bug that affected IE on
> Windows.

Nope. Just the box model bug that affected all the CSS 2 compliant browsers.
;)

It was indeed a pretty good browser for its time, though.

~~~
mortenjorck
For all the woe brought upon the web by Internet Explorer 6, the "box model
bug" is indeed the one thing it did right. It took far too long for everyone
else to admit the error and move ahead with the box-sizing CSS spec.

~~~
yuhong
You mean IE5?

------
kunai
I find this extremely saddening because Camino offered the best native
experience for OS X, with all the polish of a well-designed Cocoa app, on top
of Gecko.

I'll miss Camino.

~~~
eightyone
I want to like Firefox, I really do, but the experience on OS X is awful. It
doesn't fit well with the aesthetic of a native Mac app, and certainty
doesn't' function like one. Multi-gestures in Safari are so much smoother.
About a month or so back when the Firefox team was soliciting feedback for
something here on HN, one of the designers or developers at Mozilla had
screenshots of a version of Firefox that looked really good. I went to go
download the latest version and realized that the screenshots most have just
been Photoshop comps or something.

~~~
notatoad
did it look like this [1]? that's the UX nightly available at [2]. it's a new
theme they're working on, but it's got a few versions to go before it makes it
into stable. i'm loving it, but they're removing/changing a couple of
customization features so people are freaking out. we'll see what the final
product ends up looking like.

[1] <http://i.imgur.com/Gfns2MS.png>

[2] <http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/>

~~~
UIZealot
That's hardly a good Mac UI. On the Mac:

1\. Tab close buttons should be on the left, not the right.

2\. They got the tab title right, in the center, but site icon should be right
next to the site title, not on the far left.

~~~
Argorak
Be aware that the UX alpha is highly unstable. Many things are not finished
and from time to time just appear and vanish out of thin air.

So it can only be used as a direction indicator and as such, I think it looks
good.

~~~
UIZealot
Actually this tab style dates back to at least Firefox 3. I didn't check
further back. It looks like XUL can't do it the right way, and they don't care
enough to do it right.

~~~
Argorak
It seems like sometimes the play with it and go back to the old one (which I
actually like...).

BTW, the UX alpha is back to the old style.

