Camino Browser for Mac Officially Discontinued

Longtime Mac users are likely to be familiar with Camino, a Mac-specific browser based on Mozilla's Gecko engine, the same engine used in Netscape 6/7, Firefox, and other browsers. Officially launched in February 2002, Camino took advantage of Cocoa APIs and Apple's Aqua user interface elements and also integrated with several other Mac OS X features.

The open source browser continued under development for roughly a decade, although it was never able to achieve significant market share given its relatively low profile and Mac-only availability. In 2011, project contributors announced plans to shift Camino to the WebKit engine used by Safari, Chrome, and other current browsers, but the effort never took hold.

Camino was last updated in March 2012, and today the project's website has been updated with a message announcing that development has ceased.

After a decade-long run, Camino is no longer being developed, and we encourage all users to upgrade to a more modern browser. Camino is increasingly lagging behind the fast pace of changes on the web, and more importantly it is not receiving security updates, making it increasingly unsafe to use.

The message goes on to tout the contributions of Camino to the browsing experience, noting that former Camino developers had gone on help build Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, all of which have experienced significant popularity on the Mac platform.

Top Rated Comments

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icloud

78 months ago

pour some out for one's homie.

Rating: 17 Votes

Mac21ND

78 months ago

pour some out for one's homie.

Rating: 8 Votes

RMo

78 months ago

Oh no, not...what was it again?

Don't make fun of a (formerly) good product just because you're (probably) too young to remember it. Mozilla (yes, Mozilla, not Firefox) back in the day ran on OS X but always looked a bit out-of-place. Camino took the Gecko rendering engine from Mozilla and wrote a native Aqua interface around it. It was much nicer to use.

Oh, and then Firefox (then called Phoenix) came along later and did the something similar for Windows and Linux, albeit with the standard XUL/Gecko-based UI. They actually didn't make a Mac version at first because they didn't want to put effort into filling an already-filled niche.

Camino (formerly Chimera itself) has since fallen behind, and the look and feel of Firefox on OS X (which, of course, they eventually decided to make--once Mozilla developers shifted primary focus to Firefox rather than the suite as their future) has dramatically improved. While Firefox still doesn't integrate with OS X features like Keychain, it's no longer as bad as it once was. Meanwhile, while it was never my primary browser, I've had a hard time justifying keeping Camino around as even a backup browser.

Still, its influence is not to be understated. RIP.

Rating: 7 Votes

iThinkIt

78 months ago

So sad to see Camino go away. I really enjoyed that one. It was a good run though.

Rating: 6 Votes

GenesisST

78 months ago

Sad, but understandable.

It was my browser of choice when I first got a Mac in 2006, until Firefox was native Cocoa, but now a Chrome user.

Rating: 4 Votes

macs4nw

78 months ago

Still love those old 'aqua' user interface elements. Good memories!

Rating: 4 Votes

q64ceo

78 months ago

RIP

You were a good browser in your day. With the exception of how the tabs are designed (wished they look more like Safari) I loved the UI.

At least we still have OmniWeb

Rating: 4 Votes