Camino (from the Spanish word camino meaning "way", "path" or "road") is a free, open source, GUI-based Web browser based on Mozilla's Gecko layout engine and specifically designed for the Mac OS X operating system. In place of an XUL-based user interface used by most Mozilla-based applications, Camino uses Mac-native Cocoa APIs, although it does not use native text boxes.

As Camino's aim is to integrate as well as possible with the Macintosh OS, it uses the Aqua user interface and integrates a number of Mac OS X services and features such as the Keychain for password management and Bonjour for scanning available bookmarks across your local network. Other notable features include an integrated Pop-up blocker and Ad blocker, tabbed browsing, and support for open standards.

The browser is developed by the Camino Project, a community organization. Mike Pinkerton has been the technical lead of the Camino project since Dave Hyatt moved to the Safari team at Apple Inc. in mid-2002. The latest stable release is 1.6.7, released on March 31st, 2009. Camino 1.6.7 runs on Mac OS 10.3.9 or later.

History

In late 2001, Mike Pinkerton and Vidur Apparao started a project within Netscape to prove that Gecko could be embedded in a Cocoa application. In early 2002 Dave Hyatt, one of the co-creators of Firefox (then called Phoenix), joined the team and built Chimera, a small, lightweight browser wrapper, around their work.

The first downloadable build of Chimera 0.1 was released on February 13 2002. The early releases became popular due to their fast page-loading speeds (as compared with then-dominant Mac browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 5). Many claimed it was the fastest Web browser on the Mac, although it was not as feature-complete as its competitors.

Hyatt was hired by Apple Computer in mid-2002 to start work on what would become Safari. Meanwhile, the Chimera developers got a small team together within Netscape, with dedicated development and QA, to put together a Netscape-branded technology preview for the January 2003 Macworld Conference. However, two days before the show, AOL management decided to abandon the entire project. Despite this setback, a skeleton crew of QA and developers released Camino 0.7 on March 3 2003.

The name was changed from Chimera to Camino for legal reasons. Because of its roots in Greek mythology, Chimera has been a popular choice of name for hypermedia systems. One of the first graphical web browsers was called Chimera, and researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have also developed a complete hypermedia system of the same name. Camino is Spanish for "path", and the name was chosen to continue the "Navigator" motif.

While version 0.7 was primarily a Netscape-driven release kept afloat at the end by open source, version 0.8 was, according to lead developer Pinkerton, "a triumph of open source and open process. People from all around the world helped with patches, QA, bug triage, localization, artwork, and evangelism."