Camino 1.5 slips quietly through the door

Today, on a whim, I opened up my old Camino browser to test something, and was pleasantly surprised to be informed that I was using an old version!  Yes, the folks at Camino had quietly released the next major update for the web browser, including the latest Gecko rendering engine (as used in Firefox 2).

Before Firefox 2 was released, I used Camino as my primary web browser.  It used the same Gecko rendering engine, but housed it in a native Mac app, which made it faster, more functional, and used the pretty Mac widgets instead of the ugly PC-like ones that Firefox bundles with.  But when Firefox 2 came along Camino was left out in the cold, as it was still using old technology.  Firefox was still slow, but it had fewer bugs in the rendering.  So I’ve been using a mixture of Safari and Firefox, Safari for quick loading of pages and Firefox for web development.  Now that looks set to change, with Camino providing the power of Firefox in a sleek package that actually looks at home on the Mac.

(more…)