Camino

» see caminobrowser.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

mac users had camino. i ran windows on every machine i owned through the 2000s, with internet explorer giving way to firefox around 2005 and then chrome around 2010. camino sat in a part of the desktop i could read about on forum threads but never personally clicked through. you needed an apple machine for it to install, and apple hardware in turkey through 2002-2008 was a vanishing minority share, sold mostly to graphic designers and a small premium-buyer slice that kept macs around as a status object.

camino came out of the netscape diaspora. dave hyatt, who would later cofound webkit at apple, and mike pinkerton started it as chimera in 2002 as a side experiment: take mozilla's gecko rendering engine, wrap it in cocoa instead of mozilla's xul cross-platform shell, and ship something that actually felt like a mac app on os x. mozilla renamed chimera to camino in early 2005 after a trademark complaint from a small commercial product. the camino project itself was a community of contributors working under the mozilla foundation umbrella, with stuart morgan and smokey ardisson keeping it alive on volunteer time for most of the decade.

the camino window was thinner than firefox-for-mac's window. the menus matched os x conventions and the password manager talked to keychain rather than rolling its own store. it integrated with bonjour for network discovery on local subnets, which firefox would not do natively. for the mac users who cared about that level of native feel before safari got good, camino was the answer. then mozilla refocused on firefox proper and dropped gecko's embedding api in 2012, which meant camino could no longer be maintained as a current gecko shell. the project posted its retirement notice on may 30 2013, telling users to switch to firefox or safari.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

camino's audience was the mac-faithful before mac became the default machine of the developer class. its peak years were roughly 2004-2008, before safari's javascript engine got fast and before mobile shifted browser identity to the phone. cocoa-native felt like a real win in 2005, when firefox on os x looked obviously wrong in every menu and dialog. by 2010 safari had absorbed most of the audience that wanted a mac-feeling browser, and firefox-for-mac had at least stopped looking like a windows port. camino's market share stayed a rounding error in the global stats. inside the mac community it was a known and loved name for the people who tracked browsers at that level of detail.

~ the long tail ~

the people who built camino mostly went elsewhere. dave hyatt moved to apple and helped start webkit, which is what powers safari and every browser on ios today. mike pinkerton went to google and worked on chrome for mac. the camino codebase itself sits archived on mozilla's servers, still downloadable, even though it cannot render the modern web. modern javascript and tls after the 2013 freeze just produce errors. but the binary launches.

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