Bad news for fans of lesser-known Mac browser Camino: a big chunk of the code it depends on to display web pages is being officially retired by developers at Mozilla who maintain it.
As a result, “the future is unclear,” wrote Stuart Morgan on the Camino blog.
For those unfamiliar with it, Camino is a delightful little browser for OS X. It takes a bunch of web browsing technology originally built for Firefox, and wraps it all up in a very Mac-friendly interface. While it lacks many of the bells and whistles found in other browsers, its strengths are speed, reliability, and low impact on system resources.
Camino is an open source project, entirely dependent on volunteers. No-one gets paid to work on it. It’s also dependent on the Gecko rendering engine – a chunk of code created by Mozilla, who have decided they will no longer provide support for apps, like Camino, that wrap Gecko up inside something else.
So what’s the Camino team to do? They could try and press on with Gecko, but that would eat up a lot of resources. They could switch to a different rendering engine, such as WebKit. That will be a lot of work too, but probably more future-proof.
In the meantime, they’re going to keep working on Camino 2.1. Beyond that, the future’s uncertain. More pairs of hands could always make the difference, though – so if you’re the coding type, and want to lend a hand, get in touch.
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
14 responses to “Camino’s Long-Term Future “Unclear””
I love Camino – its the quickest, sharpest browser I’ve ever used on the mac. I like it’s lack of ‘bells n whistles’ – when I want to look up something quickly or, when using a browser in-front of a client – I choose Camino. I know I can count on it to load quickly. I really hope it continues.
Camino had best no be cancelled. It’s the best browser on the Mac, bar none. I’ve used all of them and it’s simply the best. You can’t beat it at all.
Camino was my standard browser for years, but seriously: “low impact on system resources”?! Not in my experience.
That’s my experience of it. It’s the only browser I’ve ever used that could handle many dozens of open tabs and behave itself. Most other browsers I’ve tried end up collapsing under the strain. Camino rarely has that problem.
No no no. Camino must go on! Viva Camino!
Camino is a relic
I tried it for some time but I dont see why I should skip on fully capable browsers
like firefox, safari, chrome to use a slowly developed browser that gets a small tiny update like once a year.
Liking Camino is a personal preference, but reality is, it has no real advantage over other browsers.
I do wish that FireFox for the mac would be built in a way to be integrated better with the system, cocao or whatever that program language name is
Agreed in full.