Camino browser comes to an end

The Camino browser project has announced that it has shut down. The browser had been influential within the Mac OS X community by providing an open source native web browser for the platform, but development slowed to a near halt after Mozilla ended embedding support for Gecko in 2011. The developers managed to release Camino 2.1 at the end of that year and followed it with two security updates in 2012, but now, lagging behind web development and with a complete re-engineer to a new browser engine needed, the developers have called an end to the project. Most importantly they said, the browser was no longer receiving security updates, "making it increasingly unsafe to use".

The last major release of Camino was version 2.1. The project, which saw its first release in 2002, brought together the native Mac OS X Cocoa user interface with Mozilla's Gecko library. The browser came about as a result of a project called Chimera – by Mike Pinkerton (who today leads the Chrome for iOS team) and Vidur Apparao – which set out to embed Gecko in a Cocoa application. They were joined by Dave Hyatt (co-creator of Firefox who went on to be part of the Safari and WebKit development team) and produced Chimera 0.1.

The browser would later change its name to Camino for legal reasons. It survived AOL management abandoning the project thanks to a small group of developers keeping the open source project alive. The project became independent of the Mozilla Foundation in 2005 and Pinkerton moved to Google where he worked on Camino in his "twenty per cent time". Camino 1.0 arrived in 2006, the first Mozilla family browser with universal binary support during Apple's transition from PowerPC to Intel processors. Camino 2.0 arrived in 2009 adding movable tabs and tab previews.

(djwm)