Camino
Encyclopedia
Camino is a free
, open source
, GUI-based
Web browser
based on Mozilla
's Gecko
layout engine
and specifically designed for the Mac OS X operating system
. In place of an XUL
-based user interface used by most Mozilla-based applications, Camino uses Mac-native Cocoa
API
s.
As Camino's aim is to integrate as well as possible with the Mac OS, it uses the Aqua user interface
and integrates a number of Mac OS X services and features such as the Keychain
for password management and Bonjour
for scanning available bookmarks across the local network. Other notable features include an integrated pop-up
blocker and ad blocker
, and tabbed browsing that includes an overview feature allowing tabs to be viewed all at once as pages.
The browser is developed by the Camino Project, a community organization. Mike Pinkerton
has been the technical lead of the Camino project since Dave Hyatt
moved to the Safari
team at Apple Inc. in mid-2002.
and Vidur Apparao started a project within Netscape to prove that Gecko could be embedded in a Cocoa application. In early 2002 Dave Hyatt
, one of the co-creators of Firefox
(then called Phoenix), joined the team and built Chimera, a small, lightweight browser wrapper, around their work.
The first downloadable build of Chimera 0.1 was released on February 13, 2002. The early releases became popular due to their fast page-loading speeds (as compared with then-dominant Mac browser, Microsoft
's Internet Explorer version 5
).
Hyatt was hired by Apple Computer in mid-2002 to start work on what would become Safari
. Meanwhile, the Chimera developers got a small team together within Netscape, with dedicated development and QA, to put together a Netscape-branded technology preview for the January 2003 Macworld Conference
. However, two days before the show, AOL management decided to abandon the entire project. Despite this setback, a skeleton crew of QA and developers released Camino 0.7 on March 3, 2003.
The name was changed from Chimera to Camino for legal reasons. Because of its roots in Greek mythology
, Chimera
has been a popular choice of name for hypermedia
systems. One of the first graphical web browsers was called Chimera, and researchers at the University of California, Irvine
, have also developed a complete hypermedia system of the same name. Camino is Spanish
for "path" or "road" (as in El Camino Real, aka the Royal Road), and the name was chosen to continue the "Navigator
" motif.
While version 0.7 was primarily a Netscape-driven release kept afloat at the end by open source, version 0.8 was, according to lead developer Pinkerton, "a triumph of open source and open process. People from all around the world helped with patches, QA, bug triage, localization, artwork, and evangelism."
In March 2005, Camino's Web site was moved from the Mozilla Foundation
's domain mozilla.org to the Camino Project's domain caminobrowser.org.
In September 2005, Pinkerton accepted a position at Google
where he worked closely with Google's Firefox team and continued to work on Camino during his "twenty percent" time.
Camino 1.0, released on February 14, 2006, was the first browser of the Mozilla family to appear as a universal binary
, thanks largely to the efforts of Mark Mentovai, another of the Camino developers.
Camino 2.0, released on November 18, 2009, introduced many new interface features to the browser including movable tabs and tab preview. It was the first Camino release to be Acid2
-compliant.
The most current release is 2.0.9, released on September 14th, 2011.
-compliant.
However, the current version is not known to be Acid3
compliant.
Camino's current HTML5 support via the HTML5 test standards testbed http://html5test.com/ is limited.
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
, open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
, GUI-based
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
Web browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
based on Mozilla
Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
's Gecko
Gecko (layout engine)
Gecko is a free and open source layout engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation , as well as in many other open source software projects....
layout engine
Layout engine
A web browser engine, , is a software component that takes marked up content and formatting information and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer...
and specifically designed for the Mac OS X operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
. In place of an XUL
XUL
In computer programming, XUL , the XML User Interface Language, is an XML user interface markup language developed by the Mozilla project. XUL operates in Mozilla cross-platform applications such as Firefox...
-based user interface used by most Mozilla-based applications, Camino uses Mac-native Cocoa
Cocoa (API)
Cocoa is Apple's native object-oriented application programming interface for the Mac OS X operating system and—along with the Cocoa Touch extension for gesture recognition and animation—for applications for the iOS operating system, used on Apple devices such as the iPhone, the iPod Touch, and...
API
Application programming interface
An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...
s.
As Camino's aim is to integrate as well as possible with the Mac OS, it uses the Aqua user interface
Aqua (user interface)
Aqua is the GUI and primary visual theme of Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X operating system. It is based around the theme of water, as its name suggests, with droplet-like elements and liberal use of translucency and reflection effects...
and integrates a number of Mac OS X services and features such as the Keychain
Apple Keychain
Keychain is Apple Inc.'s password management system in Mac OS. It was introduced with Mac OS 8.6, and has been included in all subsequent versions of Mac OS, including Mac OS X...
for password management and Bonjour
Bonjour (software)
In computing, Bonjour is Apple Inc.'s trade name for its implementation of Zeroconf, a group of technologies that includes service discovery, address assignment, and name resolution...
for scanning available bookmarks across the local network. Other notable features include an integrated pop-up
Pop-up ad
Pop-up ads or pop-ups are a form of online advertising on the World Wide Web intended to attract web traffic or capture email addresses. Pop-ups are generally new web browser windows to display advertisements...
blocker and ad blocker
Ad filtering
Ad filtering or ad blocking is removing or altering advertising content in a webpage. Advertising can exist in a variety of forms including pictures, animations, text, or pop-up windows. More advanced filters allow fine-grained control of advertisements through features such as blacklists,...
, and tabbed browsing that includes an overview feature allowing tabs to be viewed all at once as pages.
The browser is developed by the Camino Project, a community organization. Mike Pinkerton
Mike Pinkerton
Mike "Pink" Pinkerton is an American software developer who is known for his work on the Mozilla browsers. He lectures on Development of Open Source Software at George Washington University....
has been the technical lead of the Camino project since Dave Hyatt
Dave Hyatt
Dave Hyatt is an American software developer currently employed by Apple Inc. , where he is part of the development team responsible for the Safari web browser and WebKit framework. Hyatt was part of the original team that shipped the beta releases and 1.0 release of Safari...
moved to the Safari
Safari (web browser)
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...
team at Apple Inc. in mid-2002.
History
In late 2001, Mike PinkertonMike Pinkerton
Mike "Pink" Pinkerton is an American software developer who is known for his work on the Mozilla browsers. He lectures on Development of Open Source Software at George Washington University....
and Vidur Apparao started a project within Netscape to prove that Gecko could be embedded in a Cocoa application. In early 2002 Dave Hyatt
Dave Hyatt
Dave Hyatt is an American software developer currently employed by Apple Inc. , where he is part of the development team responsible for the Safari web browser and WebKit framework. Hyatt was part of the original team that shipped the beta releases and 1.0 release of Safari...
, one of the co-creators of Firefox
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. , Firefox is the second most widely used browser, with approximately 25% of worldwide usage share of web browsers...
(then called Phoenix), joined the team and built Chimera, a small, lightweight browser wrapper, around their work.
The first downloadable build of Chimera 0.1 was released on February 13, 2002. The early releases became popular due to their fast page-loading speeds (as compared with then-dominant Mac browser, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
's Internet Explorer version 5
Internet Explorer for Mac
Internet Explorer for Mac was a proprietary web browser developed by Microsoft for the Macintosh platform. Initial versions were developed from the same code base as Internet Explorer for Windows...
).
Hyatt was hired by Apple Computer in mid-2002 to start work on what would become Safari
Safari (web browser)
Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included with the Mac OS X and iOS operating systems. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther". Safari is also the...
. Meanwhile, the Chimera developers got a small team together within Netscape, with dedicated development and QA, to put together a Netscape-branded technology preview for the January 2003 Macworld Conference
Macworld Conference & Expo
Produced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld | iWorld is a trade-show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It is held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January...
. However, two days before the show, AOL management decided to abandon the entire project. Despite this setback, a skeleton crew of QA and developers released Camino 0.7 on March 3, 2003.
The name was changed from Chimera to Camino for legal reasons. Because of its roots in Greek mythology
Greek mythology
Greek mythology is the body of myths and legends belonging to the ancient Greeks, concerning their gods and heroes, the nature of the world, and the origins and significance of their own cult and ritual practices. They were a part of religion in ancient Greece...
, Chimera
Chimera (mythology)
The Chimera or Chimaera was, according to Greek mythology, a monstrous fire-breathing female creature of Lycia in Asia Minor, composed of the parts of multiple animals: upon the body of a lioness with a tail that ended in a snake's head, the head of a goat arose on her back at the center of her...
has been a popular choice of name for hypermedia
Hypermedia
Hypermedia is a computer-based information retrieval system that enables a user to gain or provide access to texts, audio and video recordings, photographs and computer graphics related to a particular subject.Hypermedia is a term created by Ted Nelson....
systems. One of the first graphical web browsers was called Chimera, and researchers at the University of California, Irvine
University of California, Irvine
The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...
, have also developed a complete hypermedia system of the same name. Camino is Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
for "path" or "road" (as in El Camino Real, aka the Royal Road), and the name was chosen to continue the "Navigator
Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator was a proprietary web browser that was popular in the 1990s. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corporation and the dominant web browser in terms of usage share, although by 2002 its usage had almost disappeared...
" motif.
While version 0.7 was primarily a Netscape-driven release kept afloat at the end by open source, version 0.8 was, according to lead developer Pinkerton, "a triumph of open source and open process. People from all around the world helped with patches, QA, bug triage, localization, artwork, and evangelism."
In March 2005, Camino's Web site was moved from the Mozilla Foundation
Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit organization that exists to support and provide leadership for the open source Mozilla project. The organization sets the policies that govern development, operates key infrastructure and controls trademarks and other intellectual property...
's domain mozilla.org to the Camino Project's domain caminobrowser.org.
In September 2005, Pinkerton accepted a position at Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
where he worked closely with Google's Firefox team and continued to work on Camino during his "twenty percent" time.
Camino 1.0, released on February 14, 2006, was the first browser of the Mozilla family to appear as a universal binary
Universal binary
A universal binary is, in Apple parlance, an executable file or application bundle that runs natively on either PowerPC or Intel-manufactured IA-32 or Intel 64-based Macintosh computers; it is an implementation of the concept more generally known as a fat binary.With the release of Mac OS X Snow...
, thanks largely to the efforts of Mark Mentovai, another of the Camino developers.
Camino 2.0, released on November 18, 2009, introduced many new interface features to the browser including movable tabs and tab preview. It was the first Camino release to be Acid2
Acid2
Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to expose web page rendering flaws in web browsers and other applications that render HTML. Named after the acid test for gold, it was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading...
-compliant.
The most current release is 2.0.9, released on September 14th, 2011.
Standards compliance
Camino 2.0, released on November 18, 2009, introduced many new interface features to the browser including moveable tabs and tab preview. It was the first Camino release to be Acid2Acid2
Acid2 is a test page published and promoted by the Web Standards Project to expose web page rendering flaws in web browsers and other applications that render HTML. Named after the acid test for gold, it was developed in the spirit of Acid1, a relatively narrow test of compliance with the Cascading...
-compliant.
However, the current version is not known to be Acid3
Acid3
Acid3 test is a web test page from the Web Standards Project that checks a web browser's compliance with elements of various web standards, particularly the Document Object Model and JavaScript....
compliant.
Camino's current HTML5 support via the HTML5 test standards testbed http://html5test.com/ is limited.
Multilingual support
The current version of Camino 2.0.x is available in the following languages:- Chinese (Simplified)
- Danish
- Dutch
- English (US)
- French
- German
- Italian
- Japanese
- Norwegian (Bokmål)
- Polish
- Russian
- Slovenian
- Spanish (Castellano)
- Swedish
- Turkish
Version compatibility
| Operating system Operating system An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system... |
Latest version | Gecko Gecko (layout engine) Gecko is a free and open source layout engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation , as well as in many other open source software projects.... release |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Mac OS X Mac OS X Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems... |
v10.1 Mac OS X v10.1 Mac OS X version 10.1, code named "Puma", is the second major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It superseded Mac OS X v10.0 and preceded Mac OS X v10.2. Version 10.1 was released on 25 September 2001 as a 'free update' to version 10.0... |
0.8.5 | 1.7.6 |
| v10.2.8 Mac OS X v10.2 Mac OS X version 10.2 "Jaguar" is the third major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system. It superseded Mac OS X v10.1 code name Puma and preceded Mac OS X Panther... |
1.0.6 | 1.8.0.13 | |
| v10.3.0 Mac OS X v10.3 Mac OS X Panther is the fourth major release of Mac OS X, Apple’s desktop and server operating system. It followed Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar" and preceded Mac OS X Tiger... |
1.5.5 | 1.8.1.12 | |
| v10.3.9 Mac OS X v10.3 Mac OS X Panther is the fourth major release of Mac OS X, Apple’s desktop and server operating system. It followed Mac OS X v10.2 "Jaguar" and preceded Mac OS X Tiger... |
1.6.11 | 1.8.1.24 | |
| v10.4 Mac OS X v10.4 Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger is the fifth major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Tiger was released to the public on 29 April 2005 for US$129.95 as the successor to Mac OS X Panther , which had been released 18 months earlier... |
2.0.7 | 1.9.0.20 | |
| v10.5 Mac OS X v10.5 Mac OS X Leopard is the sixth major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on 26 October 2007 as the successor of Tiger , and is available in two variants: a desktop version suitable for personal computers, and a... |
2.0.7 | 1.9.0.20 | |
| v10.6 Mac OS X v10.6 Mac OS X Snow Leopard is the seventh major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers.Snow Leopard was publicly unveiled on June 8, 2009 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference... |
2.0.7 | 1.9.0.20 | |
See also
- Browser timelineBrowser timelineA time line of web browsers from the early 1990s to the present. Prior to browsers, many technologies and systems existed for information viewing and transmission...
- Comparison of web browsersComparison of web browsersThe following tables compare general and technical information for a number of web browsers. Please see the individual products' articles for further information.-Historical web browsers:...
- Correo — an e-mail clientE-mail clientAn email client, email reader, or more formally mail user agent , is a computer program used to manage a user's email.The term can refer to any system capable of accessing the user's email mailbox, regardless of it being a mail user agent, a relaying server, or a human typing on a terminal...
based on Mozilla ThunderbirdMozilla ThunderbirdMozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser...
which shares similar design goals with Camino - List of web browsers
- Java Embedding PluginJava Embedding PluginJava Embedding Plugin enables Java on Mac OS X with non Safari browsers. This plugin is shipped with Firefox 1.5 on, and all recent versions of SeaMonkey and Camino.The latest released version: 0.9.7.3 requires Mac OS X 10.4.X or higher.- History :...
External links
- Camino - Mozilla power, Mac style - Project's Home
- Mike Pinkerton talks about Camino - "Open Source Developers at Google" Speaker Series
- CaminoKnight - Automates the process of downloading and installing the latest Camino Nightly build and creates a backup copy of the previously installed build.
- Caminol10n project - translating Camino to other languages
- Interview with Camino project head Mike Pinkerton (Ars TechnicaArs TechnicaArs Technica is a technology news and information website created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, science, technology policy, and video games. Ars Technica is known for its features, long articles that go...
, September 22, 2004) - CaminIcon - Allows you to change Camino's user interface to various preset themes.
- PimpMyCamino - User interface add-ins and tools for extended functionality
- Camino 1.0.6 - The last stable release for Mac OS 10.2 users
- Portable Camino - packaged as portable applicationPortable applicationA portable application , sometimes also called standalone, is a computer software program designed to run independently from an operating system...
for external drive.