10 ms·

Camino browser reaches its end

200 points by harshal 13y ago

kunai 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
  - TwoBit 13y ago
    I'm not a Mac fanatic, which might be why I prefer FireFox on Mac to other browsers.
  - notatoad 13y ago
    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 http://i.imgur.com/Gfns2MS.png [2] http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/ http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/
    - duaneb 13y ago
      It's not just the user interface, it's that (for example) they don't QUITE completely ignore mac (emacs) keybindings (e.g. ctrl-a should move to beginning of PARAGRAPH, but either moves to the beginning of the visual line in the textbox, or highlights whatever you've searched for if you're that unlikely). This is far worse behavior, and it's been like this for years!
    - __david__ 13y ago
      Oh, interesting. That's what Thunderbird looks like now. I was just noticing the other day that Thunderbird got really nice looking suddenly...
    - markdown 13y ago
      That rounded tab just looks off to me. Everything else looks great though.
    - UIZealot 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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 13y ago
        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 13y ago
        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.
      - eightyone 13y ago
        I think the reason they have the icon/close button switched is because when you pin a tab it goes on the left side of the screen.
    - eightyone 13y ago
      Yes! Thank you. While I don't think it looks or feels perfect yet, it at least shows that FF is still in the game working on things like this.
  - MatthewPhillips 13y ago
    Couldn't disagree more. I think Firefox looks and feels great.
  - denzil_correa 13y ago
    I would have to agree with most of what is said here. I prefer Chrome (or even Safari) over Firefox on OS X. Chrome is faster (I need to work on a slow Internet connection many times) while Safari being the bundled browser has few features like Reader etc. which I don't want to use. I still have FF installed for back up purposes but I don't use it unless something is broken on Chrome or Safari (which doesn't happen a lot). I find it extremely surprising that some sites (ex:Facebook) are (or were a few months back) displayed differently on Windows FF vs OS X FF.
  - pilif 13y ago
    The one thing that drives me mad about Firefox on the Mac is it's Home/End behavior. Ever since migrating to the Mac, I have remapped the keys to work like on windows and Linux (operating on the current line instead of the current document). You can do that using a custom key binding in ~/Library/KeyBindings. Firefox ignores this and still insists on home/end working on the full document. But even worse: in the new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works (it does in other Textareas - no idea what Google did here). Now this might totally be a case of http://xkcd.com/1172/ http://xkcd.com/1172/ but by the life of me, I cannot work without a way to move the cursor to the beginning of a line - especially when the keys that I usually use are so destructive (scrolling all the way to the top, making me lose my position). This is the only reason why using Firefox is out of the question. In the past, I patched some JS file inside the bundle, but now that Firefox updates so often and it's a signed binary, I can't really do that any more.
    - vvhn 13y ago
      >The one thing that drives me mad about Firefox on the Mac is it's Home/End behavior. Ever since migrating to the Mac, I have remapped the keys to work like on windows and Linux (operating on the current line instead of the current document) That's because Home and End keys on the Mac, like in the original UNIX, mean the beginning and the end of the document not the beginning and end of a line which is a Windows thing (and since Windows is the overwhelming presence, is commonly misunderstood as the keys themselves meaning that) and since most early Linux desktop environment's aimed to duplicate Windows, is also the default Linux behaviour now. You will find this behaviour in all Apple provided applications as well. > I cannot work without a way to move the cursor to the beginning of a line Anything that doesn't override Cocoa's default key bindings will be able to use the emacs key bindings as well (Cntrl-A for the beginning and Cntrl-E for the end of the line) >in the new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works cntrl-a and cntrl-e work.
      - TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
        >That's because Home and End keys on the Mac, like in the original UNIX, mean the beginning and the end of the document not the beginning and end of a line which is a Windows thing Is it? I'm used to them going to the beginning and the end of lines on Linux.
  - ancarda 13y ago
    Since Camino is based off Firefox, is it possible to backport some of the OS X specific code? The primary reason why I'm still using Safari rather than Firefox is because it lacks Keychain support.
    - stuartmorgan 13y ago
      There have been two attempts that I know of (and probably more) to add keychain support to Firefox, once leveraging Camino’s code. The problem wasn't technical, but resistance from Firefox leadership to the idea. IIRC they were concerned about breaking the ability to move a profile folder from one OS to another.
  - msujaws 13y ago
    We're actually very far along in implementing what you saw in those screenshots. You can download a Nightly build of it (that auto-updates) at http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/ http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/
zachwill 13y ago
Such a great browser back in the day. It was absolutely my preferred browser of choice until Chromium came to the Mac.
DelvarWorld 13y ago
sorry to see you guys go. I hope the standards of modern browsers make the change worth it. also when will opera finally be in hell?
fleitz 13y ago
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 13y ago
  IE for Mac? That has to be an oxy moron of some sort.
  - theatrus2 13y ago
    It also was the most standards compliant and performant IE of its time, being a totally different code base.
    - yuhong 13y ago
      Eg. transparent PNGs.
    - duaneb 13y ago
      Possibly because they had to please Apple AND Microsoft?
      - brokenparser 13y ago
        No. It's because MSIE for Windows wouldn't run on MacOS and they couldn't use Wine. (MSFT would never do that.)
        jonny_eh 13y ago
        Wine wouldn't have worked either since OSX was PowerPC based at the time.
        brokenparser 13y ago
        That and the fact that wine only runs on *nix, so it'd require another compatibility layer to provide POSIX and BSD functionality under classic MacOS. OSX didn't even exist at the time IE for Mac was written. They'd also have to come up with a visual theme layer so they could at least pretend it's a Mac program, long before they introduced one in Windows. All of that still wouldn't get them menu bar support, though. In hindsight, I didn't think it through at all when I mentioned wine. They do have MS-Office ports for Mac, so that product was probably written with much better separation of concerns.
eksith 13y ago
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 13y ago
  nitpick: Opera is going with Blink. Admittedly, Blink is very similar to WebKit at the moment.
  - elithrar 13y ago
    > 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.
- potch 13y ago
  That's news to me.
- shmerl 13y ago
  Arguable. Jolla uses Gecko with IPC embedding for their upcoming browser for Sailfish. Gecko is in no way out of the question. Mozilla are also working on the new Rust based browser engine (Servo).
jostmey 13y ago
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.
pbreit 13y ago
A shame the energy that went into Camino didn't go into MacFirefox.
- wmf 13y ago
  It seems like XUL required ten times as much effort to get comparable results.
  - pbreit 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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.
cantankerous 13y ago
I remember Camino running really well on my old Powerbook and also looking great. Farewell, friend!
MatthewPhillips 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    They must be quite bad at it, because both their browsers are split into components that can easily be reused in competing products.
    - No1 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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 13y ago
        http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2011/#mozembedding 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.
Jate 13y ago
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 13y ago
  your primary risk would be bad networks serving up malware, which is pretty hard to defend against
cmelbye 13y ago
Aw. Camino was awesome back in the day. Thanks to the developers for making the best browser for Mac at the time.
- michaelrkn 13y ago
  +1
coherentpony 13y ago
I didn't even know this existed until this post happened.
- racl101 13y ago
  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.
No1 13y ago
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.embedding/c_NMcO-N8wo/discussion https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embeddin...
wtallis 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
  - lawl 13y ago
    Betterprivacy can kill flash cookies. NotScripts is still only mitigating JS and not fully blocking it, at least last time I looked at the source (I also almost puked). Plus it lacks feates like clear click (anti clickjacking), ABE etc.
  - jccalhoun 13y ago
    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/oiigbmnaadbkfbmpbfijlflahbdbdgdf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scriptsafe/oiigbmn... 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/ http://hackademix.net/2009/12/10/why-chrome-has-no-noscript/
marban 13y ago
Anyone still using OmniWeb these days?
- rplacd 13y ago
  Still the go-to browser for the diehards on NS/OS, I hear. I remember figuring out how to plumb in SSL and JS support just so I could access a butchered Dropbox...
- jsolson 13y ago
  Perhaps Mr. Shipley?
- ams6110 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    +1 for TenFourFox on a G4 Cube. iCab coming second.
gdonelli 13y ago
Thank you for your contribution to the Mac community
ivanca 13y ago
They lost such a good chance to say "Es el fin del Camino!" (which means "Is the end of the Road!" in Spanish)
- shrikant 13y ago
  Camino means road? I always thought it meant "I walk"..
  - jomohke 13y ago
    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".
harshal 13y ago
Here is the post from the most recent maintainer on his blog: http://samuelsidler.com/2013/05/the-end-of-an-era/ http://samuelsidler.com/2013/05/the-end-of-an-era/ Thanks to all the devs who have worked on Camino over the years.
Samuel_Michon 13y ago
“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 13y ago
  From http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2011/#mozembedding 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 13y ago
    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.
    - gaius 13y ago
      In this case, the maintainers of a library they depended on were the ones that upped and left.
    - ams6110 13y ago
      And this differs from commercial/closed source software how? Google Reader come to mind, as one example?
patchfx 13y ago
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 13y ago
  http://caminobrowser.org/contribute/ http://caminobrowser.org/contribute/
  - patchfx 13y ago
    They should definitely add this to the frontpage.
- stuartmorgan 13y ago
  Camino has been open source and developed entirely by a community of volunteers for most of its life. There were extensive instructions on getting involved on the website for many years. There was even a specific push to recruit new people a year ago to make the transition to WebKit so that it could continue to use a modern engine, which is the only way it could have survived once Gecko stopped supporting embedding. If there were a community of people with the time/interest/skill to develop it further, the project wouldn't have shut down in the first place.
kmasters 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mhd 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.
joshmoz 13y ago
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.
fuzzywalrus 13y ago
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?
racl101 13y ago
You could say Camino has ... * puts on shades * Reached the end of the road! * Cue the CSI theme * YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
- Domenic_S 13y ago
  whoa, am I on reddit now?
officemonkey 13y ago
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.
Tycho 13y ago
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.

200 points by harshal 13y ago

kunai 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
- TwoBit 13y ago
  I'm not a Mac fanatic, which might be why I prefer FireFox on Mac to other browsers.
- notatoad 13y ago
  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 http://i.imgur.com/Gfns2MS.png [2] http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/ http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/
  - duaneb 13y ago
    It's not just the user interface, it's that (for example) they don't QUITE completely ignore mac (emacs) keybindings (e.g. ctrl-a should move to beginning of PARAGRAPH, but either moves to the beginning of the visual line in the textbox, or highlights whatever you've searched for if you're that unlikely). This is far worse behavior, and it's been like this for years!
  - __david__ 13y ago
    Oh, interesting. That's what Thunderbird looks like now. I was just noticing the other day that Thunderbird got really nice looking suddenly...
  - markdown 13y ago
    That rounded tab just looks off to me. Everything else looks great though.
  - UIZealot 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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 13y ago
        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.
    - eightyone 13y ago
      I think the reason they have the icon/close button switched is because when you pin a tab it goes on the left side of the screen.
  - eightyone 13y ago
    Yes! Thank you. While I don't think it looks or feels perfect yet, it at least shows that FF is still in the game working on things like this.
- MatthewPhillips 13y ago
  Couldn't disagree more. I think Firefox looks and feels great.
- denzil_correa 13y ago
  I would have to agree with most of what is said here. I prefer Chrome (or even Safari) over Firefox on OS X. Chrome is faster (I need to work on a slow Internet connection many times) while Safari being the bundled browser has few features like Reader etc. which I don't want to use. I still have FF installed for back up purposes but I don't use it unless something is broken on Chrome or Safari (which doesn't happen a lot). I find it extremely surprising that some sites (ex:Facebook) are (or were a few months back) displayed differently on Windows FF vs OS X FF.
- pilif 13y ago
  The one thing that drives me mad about Firefox on the Mac is it's Home/End behavior. Ever since migrating to the Mac, I have remapped the keys to work like on windows and Linux (operating on the current line instead of the current document). You can do that using a custom key binding in ~/Library/KeyBindings. Firefox ignores this and still insists on home/end working on the full document. But even worse: in the new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works (it does in other Textareas - no idea what Google did here). Now this might totally be a case of http://xkcd.com/1172/ http://xkcd.com/1172/ but by the life of me, I cannot work without a way to move the cursor to the beginning of a line - especially when the keys that I usually use are so destructive (scrolling all the way to the top, making me lose my position). This is the only reason why using Firefox is out of the question. In the past, I patched some JS file inside the bundle, but now that Firefox updates so often and it's a signed binary, I can't really do that any more.
  - vvhn 13y ago
    >The one thing that drives me mad about Firefox on the Mac is it's Home/End behavior. Ever since migrating to the Mac, I have remapped the keys to work like on windows and Linux (operating on the current line instead of the current document) That's because Home and End keys on the Mac, like in the original UNIX, mean the beginning and the end of the document not the beginning and end of a line which is a Windows thing (and since Windows is the overwhelming presence, is commonly misunderstood as the keys themselves meaning that) and since most early Linux desktop environment's aimed to duplicate Windows, is also the default Linux behaviour now. You will find this behaviour in all Apple provided applications as well. > I cannot work without a way to move the cursor to the beginning of a line Anything that doesn't override Cocoa's default key bindings will be able to use the emacs key bindings as well (Cntrl-A for the beginning and Cntrl-E for the end of the line) >in the new Gmail compose window, not even Command-Left/Right works cntrl-a and cntrl-e work.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago
      >That's because Home and End keys on the Mac, like in the original UNIX, mean the beginning and the end of the document not the beginning and end of a line which is a Windows thing Is it? I'm used to them going to the beginning and the end of lines on Linux.
- ancarda 13y ago
  Since Camino is based off Firefox, is it possible to backport some of the OS X specific code? The primary reason why I'm still using Safari rather than Firefox is because it lacks Keychain support.
  - stuartmorgan 13y ago
    There have been two attempts that I know of (and probably more) to add keychain support to Firefox, once leveraging Camino’s code. The problem wasn't technical, but resistance from Firefox leadership to the idea. IIRC they were concerned about breaking the ability to move a profile folder from one OS to another.
- msujaws 13y ago
  We're actually very far along in implementing what you saw in those screenshots. You can download a Nightly build of it (that auto-updates) at http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/ http://people.mozilla.org/~jwein/ux-nightly/

zachwill 13y ago

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

DelvarWorld 13y ago

sorry to see you guys go. I hope the standards of modern browsers make the change worth it. also when will opera finally be in hell?

fleitz 13y ago

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 13y ago
IE for Mac? That has to be an oxy moron of some sort.
- theatrus2 13y ago
  It also was the most standards compliant and performant IE of its time, being a totally different code base.
  - yuhong 13y ago
    Eg. transparent PNGs.
  - duaneb 13y ago
    Possibly because they had to please Apple AND Microsoft?
    - brokenparser 13y ago
      No. It's because MSIE for Windows wouldn't run on MacOS and they couldn't use Wine. (MSFT would never do that.)
      - jonny_eh 13y ago
        Wine wouldn't have worked either since OSX was PowerPC based at the time.
        brokenparser 13y ago
        That and the fact that wine only runs on *nix, so it'd require another compatibility layer to provide POSIX and BSD functionality under classic MacOS. OSX didn't even exist at the time IE for Mac was written. They'd also have to come up with a visual theme layer so they could at least pretend it's a Mac program, long before they introduced one in Windows. All of that still wouldn't get them menu bar support, though. In hindsight, I didn't think it through at all when I mentioned wine. They do have MS-Office ports for Mac, so that product was probably written with much better separation of concerns.

eksith 13y ago

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 13y ago
nitpick: Opera is going with Blink. Admittedly, Blink is very similar to WebKit at the moment.
- elithrar 13y ago
  > 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.
potch 13y ago
That's news to me.
shmerl 13y ago
Arguable. Jolla uses Gecko with IPC embedding for their upcoming browser for Sailfish. Gecko is in no way out of the question. Mozilla are also working on the new Rust based browser engine (Servo).

jostmey 13y ago

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.

pbreit 13y ago

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

wmf 13y ago
It seems like XUL required ten times as much effort to get comparable results.
- pbreit 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.

cantankerous 13y ago

I remember Camino running really well on my old Powerbook and also looking great. Farewell, friend!

MatthewPhillips 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  They must be quite bad at it, because both their browsers are split into components that can easily be reused in competing products.
  - No1 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2011/#mozembedding 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.

Jate 13y ago

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 13y ago
your primary risk would be bad networks serving up malware, which is pretty hard to defend against

cmelbye 13y ago

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

michaelrkn 13y ago
+1

coherentpony 13y ago

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

racl101 13y ago
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.

No1 13y ago

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.embedding/c_NMcO-N8wo/discussion https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.embeddin...

wtallis 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.
- lawl 13y ago
  Betterprivacy can kill flash cookies. NotScripts is still only mitigating JS and not fully blocking it, at least last time I looked at the source (I also almost puked). Plus it lacks feates like clear click (anti clickjacking), ABE etc.
- jccalhoun 13y ago
  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/oiigbmnaadbkfbmpbfijlflahbdbdgdf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scriptsafe/oiigbmn... 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/ http://hackademix.net/2009/12/10/why-chrome-has-no-noscript/

marban 13y ago

Anyone still using OmniWeb these days?

rplacd 13y ago
Still the go-to browser for the diehards on NS/OS, I hear. I remember figuring out how to plumb in SSL and JS support just so I could access a butchered Dropbox...
jsolson 13y ago
Perhaps Mr. Shipley?
ams6110 13y ago
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 13y ago
  +1 for TenFourFox on a G4 Cube. iCab coming second.

gdonelli 13y ago

Thank you for your contribution to the Mac community

ivanca 13y ago

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

shrikant 13y ago
Camino means road? I always thought it meant "I walk"..
- jomohke 13y ago
  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".

harshal 13y ago

Here is the post from the most recent maintainer on his blog: http://samuelsidler.com/2013/05/the-end-of-an-era/ http://samuelsidler.com/2013/05/the-end-of-an-era/ Thanks to all the devs who have worked on Camino over the years.

Samuel_Michon 13y ago

“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 13y ago
From http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2011/#mozembedding 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 13y ago
  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.
  - gaius 13y ago
    In this case, the maintainers of a library they depended on were the ones that upped and left.
  - ams6110 13y ago
    And this differs from commercial/closed source software how? Google Reader come to mind, as one example?

patchfx 13y ago

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 13y ago
http://caminobrowser.org/contribute/ http://caminobrowser.org/contribute/
- patchfx 13y ago
  They should definitely add this to the frontpage.
stuartmorgan 13y ago
Camino has been open source and developed entirely by a community of volunteers for most of its life. There were extensive instructions on getting involved on the website for many years. There was even a specific push to recruit new people a year ago to make the transition to WebKit so that it could continue to use a modern engine, which is the only way it could have survived once Gecko stopped supporting embedding. If there were a community of people with the time/interest/skill to develop it further, the project wouldn't have shut down in the first place.

kmasters 13y ago

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 13y ago
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)

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

mhd 13y ago

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 13y ago
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.

joshmoz 13y ago

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.

fuzzywalrus 13y ago

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?

racl101 13y ago

You could say Camino has ... * puts on shades * Reached the end of the road! * Cue the CSI theme * YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

Domenic_S 13y ago
whoa, am I on reddit now?

officemonkey 13y ago

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.

Tycho 13y ago

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.