Section A.2. Camino

A.2. Camino

Mozilla and Firefox are great browsers for Mac OS X, but they suffer from a similar problem: neither is a native Mac OS X application from the ground up, so neither is built using the native Cocoa user interface. For Mac users, Cocoa apps tend to be slicker and more polished, and they act more like standard Mac OS programs. With this lack in mind, the Mozilla Project hosts Camino (formerly Chimera), a web browser that is essentially the Gecko rendering engine found in Mozilla and Firefox, but with an interface built using Cocoa. The idea is to have all the power, standards compliance, and compatibility of Firefox, but with the elegance that Mac users expect from their programs. You can see the results in [click here].

To get Camino on your Mac OS X system, head over to http://www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/, download the disk image, install it, and go.

A.2.1. Background

Camino began life as Chimera in early 2002, but it was forced to change its name in March 2003 because a Unix-based browser named Chimera already existed. Camino is still being developed and shows no sign of slowing down.

A.2.2. What's Cool About Camino?

If you love the Mac OS X interface, you'll like Camino. In addition, Camino does a great job of supporting core Mac OS X features:

Rendezvous

Apple has developed a new technology, named Rendezvous, that automatically detects networked devices and configures a computer to use them (it's currently being ported to Windows and Linux). Camino automatically detects any FTP or web servers on a network, as well as printers, webcams, and other networked devices.

Keychain

The Mac OS X Keychain securely stores passwords for logging into web sites; Camino uses the Keychain to store and retrieve passwords, for more secure, simple web browsing.

Address Book

Apple's Address Book integrates your contacts into one program that is available system-wide to any other program that wishes to use that data. Camino uses the Address Book when you're sending web pages to other people.

A.2.3. What Needs Work?

Camino is very much a project still under heavy development, so expect bugs, instability, and other problems. In addition, documentation is still somewhat lacking. Both situations will undoubtedly improve.

The bigger issue for Camino is its continued viability as both Firefox and Safari (discussed later) continue their development. It's always nice to have a choice among browsers, but Camino may get lost in the shuffle around these two well-known and well-marketed Mac OS X browsers.