Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

CaminoBrowser.org Launches

Posted by timothy on from the pinstripeyness dept.

Samuel Sidler writes "Introducing CaminoBrowser.org, the new Camino project site. The pages have been completely revamped with up-to-date information, useful and easy-to-read support pages, and, of course, pretty pictures. Months of effort have gone into creating a truly excellent site. While the product pages will remain hosted at mozilla.org, our new website will be the home of the project and all support/development information as well as up-to-date news and information."

15 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Great! by Kraeloc · · Score: 4, Funny

    I wish they still called it Chimera. Camino reminds me of the rusted-out junk heap sitting on cinderblocks in my neighbors front yard.

  2. Ok, we have clones by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Insightful
    can we now have some innovation? I remember reading a scientific paper, around 1999, which showed that 90% of web browser users hate "history". They use the back button, hardly ever use the forward button and get annoyed as hell when they lose an entire "forward history" because they happened to click on a link after they went "back". Every browser on the planet (probably, maybe, probably not Opera, don't flame me) still has this annoying behaviour. The paper found that the best "history" was a pictorial one that actually showed the user when and how they got to a page with a thumbnail of that page as each node in the tree. That was pretty damn cool! Unfortunately I don't have it for FireFox or any of the many clones.

    That's one aspect of a web browser, there's dozens more. I kinda feel like tabs are the last real innovation for web browsers. Kinda like cup holders in cinemas. Guess I should be greatful it didn't take 30 years.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
    1. Re:Ok, we have clones by guet · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Actually, I've just been looking at history for a different kind of program, and was surprised by how counter-intuitive the browser ones are when I examined them. The Safari one doesn't reflect the menu, and removes previous moves when you take a positive action and aren't at the top of the history stack.

      An easy solution is to flip the history ahead of the current position and insert it before current when the user chooses a new site.

      ie (where '-' is current position and the user has come back to site c from site a)

      a
      b
      c-
      d
      e

      when the user clicks on new site f becomes

      f-
      c
      b
      a
      d
      e

      because the user just came to c back through b and a, so to them a and b are behind them now.
      Rather than starting it again with

      f-
      c

      As Safari does. Perhaps there are other orderings that make more sense - it'd be interesting to see how a lot of people use history, and how the current ones frustrate them - you don't have a link for that paper do you?

    2. Re:Ok, we have clones by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I couldn't agree more. I've always felt that browser history should be a tree, not a list, and that you should be able to navigate it graphically. At the very least, the forward button should provide a drop down list of potential destinations. Another thing that irritates me about browser history is the fact that (in most browsers I've used) opening a link in a new tab causes it not to inherit the history from the previous tab. Why can I not go back to the page I just came from when I have opened a link in a new tab and closed the old one? Sometimes I feel like beating browser developers to death with the principle of least surprise.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  3. Speaking of Gecko Browsers Using Native Widgets... by FlipmodePlaya · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I recently stumbled upon Kazehakase, which uses GTK+ and is available for Linux. It's in many ways a superior Gecko browser for Linux to Firefox, mostly because it avoids the drawbacks of XUL. It has mouse gestures, full text search and thumbnailed history, RSS, better tabbing (drag and drop of them, they can be displayed vertically, etc.), and I believe some sort of benefit for Japanses speakers. Despite their limited development base, I really think Firefox's platform-specific alternatives (including Camino and K-Meleon) are superior to it.

  4. Re:Why? by Kraeloc · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Speed. Speed speed speed. Camino uses a small fraction of the resources that Firefox does.

  5. Firefox doesn't cut it by Goalie_Ca · · Score: 4, Insightful

    For a mac, firefox just doesn't cut it. I really love the extensions but i'm willing to live without them to have the power of the wheel mouse and other such useful things. Camino uses a nice native cocoa interface which makes a big difference in usability.

    --

    ----
    Go canucks, habs, and sens!
    1. Re:Firefox doesn't cut it by dimator · · Score: 4, Informative

      There's at least one extension that works pretty well under Camino, and once I installed it, Camino became a lot more responsive on my old-ish iBook. It's flashblock, and since I hate pretty much all flash, especially all the ads, this has been a great addition.

      --
      python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
  6. Integrated Services by ravenspear · · Score: 5, Informative

    Camino has built in support for a lot of the system wide OS X features like Keychain, the spell checker, Address Book, most of the cocoa services, and probably a few others I'm forgetting.

  7. Re:Camino's neat, but... by dn15 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    On the other hand, if Safari follows KDE's lead (Safari's still based off Konqueror/KDE code, I believe), and ports the Moz rendering engine for use with Safari, they could, in theory at least, also make Firefox's plugins work also...
    The abundance of extensions for Firefox is in no small part thanks to the way the interface was handled (XUL.) Most of them would be useless in Safari even if it used Gecko, just like Camino can't currently use Firefox extensions either. To make them usable you'd have to adopt both the front-end and back-end of Firefox. And if you're going to do that, you might as well just use Firefox itself.
  8. The three minute test... by lpangelrob2 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I've had Camino 0.8 on my PB for a bit... it's been relegated to my 3rd browser, though. It's not a bad browser by any means.

    Camino:
    +Nicer tabs
    +Better scrolling
    +Better integration
    -No Mozilla extensions. :-(
    -So no way to block Flash or images natively
    +Much better preference panel
    +Pretty close functionality to Safari.
    +Fastest of the three, it seems.

    Firefox:
    -A little glitchy at times
    +Very good extensions support
    +Works mostly the same as Firefox on other platforms
    -Integration with OSX not so good, nor is it supposed to be.
    -Slow at times.

    Safari:
    +Just works
    -No way to block annoying Flash popups

    Safari works for most things, Firefox works for the rest, and Camino sort of just ends up out there in case the first two don't work.

    --
    -Rob
    Marriage doesn't have to suck!
  9. A little history. by Xenex · · Score: 5, Informative
    "So why write an entire browser instead of adding native widgets to the Mac port of Firefox?"
    That's not what happened.

    Camino (then Chimera) was first released in January 2002. Firefox (then Phoenix) was first released in September 2002, and said this about the Mac:
    Where's the mac version?
    There is no mac version. While Phoenix could be made to run on Mac without much trouble, we see no point in competing with Chimera. Chimera is the lightweight, standalone Mozilla browser solution for Mac OS X. We have received requests for a Mac classic version, and are considering the idea.
    Not until Firebird 0.6 in May 2003 was the Mac was officially supported. If you're going to 'blame' a project for duplicating effort, don't blame Camino.

    Also, an amusing aside: Dave Hyatt started both the Chimera and Phoenix projects. Now he works fulltime at Apple on Safari...
  10. Re:Why? by Trurl's+Machine · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What does Camino offer that Firefox doesn't? The products seem to do much the same thing, and indeed, look virtually identical on the Mac. I guess my question is, why would somebody want to use Camino over Firefox?

    MacOS X has two native API's - carbon and cocoa. Carbon hardly has any virtues of its own, it's main advantage is that its relatively easy to port old, non-Unix Mac applications to Carbon, so whenever anyone has any project that has its roots still in last century, he sticks with Carbon. This is not just the case of various Mozilla-derivative projects but also of - say - Microsoft Office for MacOS. Cocoa is the "native native" API and here's where MacOS X really shines. If you use MacOS X a lot, you tend to hate Carbon and favor Cocoa because Cocoa apps offer much better overall integration with systemwide services, such as your favorite spellchecker, they generally run faster and consume less resources. Camino is Cocoa, Firefox is Carbon.

  11. Re:Slick by revscat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Looking at the screenshots there's lots of improvements since I last saw it (0.7), but on the Mac side, Safari does everything I need.

    My only problem with Safari is that it is so noticeably slower on HTTPS connections. I use a G4 at work, and any time I need to use an HTTPS connection I use Camino because Safari drags so much. It's not so noticeable at home where I have a 1.8GHz G5, but when on slower machines (including my mom's iBook), Safari just drags on secure connections.

  12. Chimera reminds me of... by MarcQuadra · · Score: 3, Funny

    Well 'Chimera' reminds ME of the lump on my back that was supposed to be my twin brother. Oh the humanity!

    --
    "Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails