Friday, May 31, 2013

Adios, Camino

The venerable alternative-Gecko browser Camino has officially breathed its last. As a Camino user back before it was called Camino, I would still be using Camino today if Mozilla hadn't announced they were ending not only support for PowerPC in Fx4, but also ending support for true embedding in Gecko, which is what Camino relies upon. Truly, as most of us here know, the browser had been on life support for nearly a year. I didn't seriously think they'd make the jump to WebKit; they would be just another WebKit shell and there are tonnes of those.

If Camino had continued past Mozilla 1.9.2, there's the chance that TenFourFox might have been a continuation of Camino, not a continuation of Firefox (TenFourCam?). But even though it was rough going with this port initially, I think the right decision was made because by going with Firefox as the basis we can keep better technological pace with the Web as much as possible. Nevertheless, I will miss Camino terribly, and while Mozilla may have had good reasons for making those technical decisions, it still sucks.

UPDATE: Samuel Sidler, one of the Camino developers, has a small epitaph for Camino on his blog.

7 comments:

  1. Didn't you say that if Camino ever stopped supporting PowerPC, you'd port the backend of Gecko 2 into it? Is that going to happen now, or are you going to stick with TenFourFox?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. At one time I thought about it, especially when it looked like we would be stuck on 2.0 for good because of the linker problems getting Firefox 5 off the ground. But we're now far beyond 2.0, and I imagine getting all the moving pieces operational would be a huge amount of work by now. I'm planning to stick with developing 10.4Fx.

      Delete
  2. I don't usually get sentimental about software, but I'll miss Camino. It was great in its day, and so was the community at their Mozilla forums. Although one thing that will live on with me is their ad blocker .css file which remains the best. I still use it in TenFourFox.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh yeah? How do you set that up? It might be lighterweight than AdBlock.

      Delete
    2. I think Blogger ate my reply, so I'll leave this here again:

      You should find ad_blocking.css in the Resources folder inside the Camino.app package. Copy it to the "chrome" folder in your Firefox Application Support folder and rename it UserContent.css (not sure if the rename is required, but I did it anyway). Then restart TenFourFox, and as you add additional rules a restart is required for them to take effect as well.

      I'm not sure, but I think this approach just blocks displaying ads, not downloading. So if you like AdBlock's blocking of trackers this may not be the best fit, though I use this with NoScript which would probably make AdBlock redundant.

      Delete
    3. This is pretty useful information to me! I read this and then forgot about it, but remembered it when I installed Privoxy, which blocks ads, protects your privacy online, and a lot more. The thing is, when it blocks ads, TenFourFox displays an error about the proxy stopping connections to the server. What you can do to fix this is have the adblocking module from Camino added to TenFourFox like Dan specified, so that it displays nothing when it blocks ads, as well as stopping them from downloading (The CSS doesn't seem to know if the connection has been blocked, so it just displays whitespace)

      Delete
  3. Even with all of the latest browser options available for OS X today, Camino was by far the most Mac-like when it came to being simple and clean. I loved it. All of my G4 and G5 machines still have it installed.

    As I open Camino it still looks modern.

    ReplyDelete

Due to an increased frequency of spam, comments are now subject to moderation.