I just ran out of steam last night so I didn't get a post together on the release of Camino 0.8 Beta (but I did get it announced at mozilla.org which I'm sure is the preferred location for those kinds of things). Well, it's here -- and it's good. After a long lapse, I've ben using the Camino nightly builds for about a month and there are huge improvements over Camino 0.7.
The new look is the most obvious first-glance upate when compared to 0.7. Initially, I was a bit shocked at the colorful buttons but after using it for a few days I can't tell you how much easier it is to hit the right button than in Firefox (pinstripe) and Safari. Colors really do matter and this push to strip them out of so many mac applications I think is a mistake. It's hard to describe clearly, but when I'm using Camino, my mouse just finds the right button without me having to think about it.
The second change that I appreciated was the retiring of the drawer. When OS X introduced that widget, I thought it was the coolest thing and I was quite pleased to see Camino put it to use as a sidebar/sub-window manager. My crush is gone and I'm no longer so enamored of the cute widget. Drawer gone, Camino has a great new Bookmarks management interface. The Bookmarks search feature makes this bookmark slob a happy camper. Long ago, my list got too long to manage and I stopped keeping any sort of organization so I've got a big ugly flat list of thousands of bookmarks, hundreds of which I need regular access to. Camino's bookmark search is a welcome help.
A regular Firefox user, I also really appreciate the addition of the Google search bar to the primary toolbar. This was one of the Firefox (Phoenix at the time) features that I was happy to see picked up by Safari and now that Camino has it, all Mac users, regardless of browser choice, can use this obviously good feature. Doing without it is kinda like being asked to browse without a URLbar.
The other feature that really won me over was the addition of type ahead find. I've grown so accustomed to it in Firefox and Mozilla that I instinctively hit the slash and start typing my search term in even my non-browser applications so having it there for Camino is huge for me.
On top of all of that goodness, this beta is Camino's first release from contemporary Mozilla sources. The 0.7 release was from the ancient Mozilla 1.0 branch so in moving forward to the Mozilla 1.7 branch, Camino picks up all kinds of great Gecko fixes, stability improvements, and performance. Mozilla branched for 1.0 over two years ago and the trunk has seen about 1.5 million lines of code changed since the. Gecko has not only made major gains in support of standards and the existing Web, but it's done that while getting smaller and considerably faster.
If you've been stuck on Camino 0.7 or you've ventured off onto some other browser and haven't used Camino in a while, download this release and give it a try. It's good stuff.
Thanks Mike, for making such a great Mac browser.
