Camino (web browser)
Camino (web browser)
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Camino (web browser)

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Camino (web browser)

Camino (from the Spanish word camino meaning "path") is a discontinued free, open source, GUI-based Web browser based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine and specifically designed for the OS X operating system. In place of an XUL-based user interface used by most Mozilla-based applications, Camino used Mac-native Cocoa APIs. On May 30, 2013, the Camino Project announced that the browser is no longer being developed.

As Camino's aim was to integrate as well as possible with OS X, it used the Aqua user interface and integrated a number of 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 included an integrated pop-up blocker and ad blocker, and tabbed browsing that included an overview feature allowing tabs to be viewed all at once as pages.

The browser was developed by the Camino Project, a community organization. Mike Pinkerton had been the technical lead of the Camino project since Dave Hyatt moved to the Safari team at Apple Inc. in mid-2002.

In late 2001, Mike Pinkerton 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. "Chimera" is a mythological beast with parts taken from various animals and as the new browser represented an early example of Carbon/C++ code interacting with Cocoa/Objective-C code, the name must have seemed apt.

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 or OmniGroup's OmniWeb, which then used the Cocoa text system as its rendering engine).

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.[citation needed] 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, a.k.a. 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."

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