Camino 2.0 Alpha 1 released
The Camino team has announced the availability of Camino 2 Alpha 1, the native Mac OS X Gecko-based based browser.
Among its major improvements is the update to the most recent Gecko 1.9 rendering engine (the same used in Firefox 3) with all the performance enhancements.
A new tab overview feature (accessible from the Window menu) displays a thumbnail of all currently opened tabs, similar to some Firefox extensions and a tab preview feature in the works for Firefox 3.1.
Camino tab overview (thanks sauron @ Mozilla IRC)
Full page zoom and a submenu to recover closed tabs in the History menus are also introduced in this development release.
As with any alpha, caution is well advised. For more details and download link, check out the Camino preview site.
Martin XY
Why do they not use the Gecko 1.9.1 Engine?
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Stuart MorganOctober 22nd, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Using Gecko 1.9.1 would require rewriting several significant portions of Camino, because some older components that we still need and were originally going to be left in place until Mozilla 2 were instead removed in Gecko 1.9.1. That means we’d have to do work we didn’t anticipate being necessary for many months, if not longer, is suddenly an immediate requirement of using Gecko 1.9.1.
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Martin XYOctober 22nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Oh, I see… I didn’t know that Gecko 1.9.1 have some major changes… But as I can remember, Mozilla drops the support for previous engine versions after only 6 month. Because Firefox 3.1 (Gecko 1.9.1) should be released sometimes in the first quarter 2009, the Gecko 1.9.0 Branch will be closed sometimes in summer. I don’t know how the roadmap for Camino 2.0 is look like, but since there is just the first alpha version, I imagine that the development will take some time. Can’t it be that there isn’t enough “supporting time” for the 1.9.0 branch?
I’m just interested in that stuff… Thanks for all the explanations!
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