CaminoBrowser.org Launches

Samuel Sidler writes "Introducing CaminoBrowser.org, the new Camino project site. The pages have been completely revamped with up-to-date information, useful and easy-to-read support pages, and, of course, pretty pictures. Months of effort have gone into creating a truly excellent site. While the product pages will remain hosted at mozilla.org, our new website will be the home of the project and all support/development information as well as up-to-date news and information."

Ok, we have clones

[QuantumG]

can we now have some innovation? I remember reading a scientific paper, around 1999, which showed that 90% of web browser users hate "history". They use the back button, hardly ever use the forward button and get annoyed as hell when they lose an entire "forward history" because they happened to click on a link after they went "back". Every browser on the planet (probably, maybe, probably not Opera, don't flame me) still has this annoying behaviour. The paper found that the best "history" was a pictorial one that actually showed the user when and how they got to a page with a thumbnail of that page as each node in the tree. That was pretty damn cool! Unfortunately I don't have it for FireFox or any of the many clones.

That's one aspect of a web browser, there's dozens more. I kinda feel like tabs are the last real innovation for web browsers. Kinda like cup holders in cinemas. Guess I should be greatful it didn't take 30 years.

Re:Why?

[Kraeloc]

Speed. Speed speed speed. Camino uses a small fraction of the resources that Firefox does.

Firefox doesn't cut it

[Goalie_Ca]

For a mac, firefox just doesn't cut it. I really love the extensions but i'm willing to live without them to have the power of the wheel mouse and other such useful things. Camino uses a nice native cocoa interface which makes a big difference in usability.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

custom widgets don't behave like native widgets. if you still don't get it, please never write mac software.

Re:Camino's neat, but...

[dn15]

On the other hand, if Safari follows KDE's lead (Safari's still based off Konqueror/KDE code, I believe), and ports the Moz rendering engine for use with Safari, they could, in theory at least, also make Firefox's plugins work also...

The abundance of extensions for Firefox is in no small part thanks to the way the interface was handled (XUL.) Most of them would be useless in Safari even if it used Gecko, just like Camino can't currently use Firefox extensions either. To make them usable you'd have to adopt both the front-end and back-end of Firefox. And if you're going to do that, you might as well just use Firefox itself.

Re:Ok, we have clones

[guet]

Actually, I've just been looking at history for a different kind of program, and was surprised by how counter-intuitive the browser ones are when I examined them. The Safari one doesn't reflect the menu, and removes previous moves when you take a positive action and aren't at the top of the history stack.

An easy solution is to flip the history ahead of the current position and insert it before current when the user chooses a new site.

ie (where '-' is current position and the user has come back to site c from site a)

a
b
c-
d
e

when the user clicks on new site f becomes

f-
c
b
a
d
e

because the user just came to c back through b and a, so to them a and b are behind them now.
Rather than starting it again with

f-
c

As Safari does. Perhaps there are other orderings that make more sense - it'd be interesting to see how a lot of people use history, and how the current ones frustrate them - you don't have a link for that paper do you?

Re:Ok, we have clones

[PatSmarty]

Why so complicated? Dude, just timestamp every page visit and sort the menu by timestamp. Simple, consistent, effective.

Cheers!

Re:Why?

[Trurl's Machine]

What does Camino offer that Firefox doesn't? The products seem to do much the same thing, and indeed, look virtually identical on the Mac. I guess my question is, why would somebody want to use Camino over Firefox?

MacOS X has two native API's - carbon [apple.com] and cocoa [apple.com]. Carbon hardly has any virtues of its own, it's main advantage is that its relatively easy to port old, non-Unix Mac applications to Carbon, so whenever anyone has any project that has its roots still in last century, he sticks with Carbon. This is not just the case of various Mozilla-derivative projects but also of - say - Microsoft Office for MacOS. Cocoa is the "native native" API and here's where MacOS X really shines. If you use MacOS X a lot, you tend to hate Carbon and favor Cocoa because Cocoa apps offer much better overall integration with systemwide services, such as your favorite spellchecker, they generally run faster and consume less resources. Camino is Cocoa, Firefox is Carbon.

Re:Ok, we have clones

[TheRaven64]

I couldn't agree more. I've always felt that browser history should be a tree, not a list, and that you should be able to navigate it graphically. At the very least, the forward button should provide a drop down list of potential destinations. Another thing that irritates me about browser history is the fact that (in most browsers I've used) opening a link in a new tab causes it not to inherit the history from the previous tab. Why can I not go back to the page I just came from when I have opened a link in a new tab and closed the old one? Sometimes I feel like beating browser developers to death with the principle of least surprise.