Mozilla releases first alpha for Camino 2.1 Mac web browser

The Camino Project developers have released the first alpha for version 2.1 of their open source web browser for Mac OS X. The Camino Project is almost as old as Firefox and also uses the Gecko rendering engine. The main difference is that the user interface is based on Cocoa instead of XUL to better tailor Camino exclusively to the Mac operating system.

Camino 2.1 Alpha 1 on Mac OS X 10.6. Like Firefox 3.6, Camino 2.1 is based on version 1.9.2 of Mozilla's Gecko web rendering platform; this includes enhanced support for web standards as well as improved JavaScript performance. Other notable improvements include a new history backend, the addition of an option to hide the status bar and an "overhaul" to the location bar’s autocomplete function, which now searches bookmarks as well as the history. Other changes include new “Work Offline” and “Go Online” menu items to enter offline mode, localisation updates and various user interface improvements.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the release, including a list of known issues, can be found in a post on the Camino blog and in the release notes. Camino 2.1 Alpha 1 is available to download for Mac OS X 10.4 or later from the project's site. The developers note that users already running the Camino nightly builds should be notified of the preview release via the built-in software update mechanism.

Camino source code is released under the MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license. The latest stable release is version 2.0.6 from 16 November, a security and maintenance update to the 2.0.x branch of Camino.

See also:

• Mozilla releases Thunderbird 3.3 Alpha 2, a report from The H.
• Mozilla releases Firefox 4 Beta 9, a report from The H.

(crve)