Camino browser reaches its end

[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.

[masklinn]

I still love it. To this day it remains my primary browser, through its aged rendering, through its lockups on JS-heavy sites, through its dated icons, through everything. Because the UI of every other browser just feels wrong. Aside from Safari maybe, but Safari's tab bar makes it impossible to handle 50+ tabs.

[GigabyteCoin]

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

[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.

[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

[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.

[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.

[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"..

[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).

[shmerl]

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).

[potch]

That's news to me.

[battwell]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[masklinn]

Aside from that, Mozilla backed out Gecko embedding a long time ago, which is why Camino still operates with a Firefox 3.6 Gecko. That makes maintainership futile when the browser can only fall further and further behind on its ability to simply render websites.

[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.

[exterm]

This is why opera is now using chromium.

[cantankerous]

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

[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...

[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

[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.

[zachwill]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[stuartmorgan]

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.

[supercoder]

http://caminobrowser.org/contribute/

[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.

[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.