Long term future of Camino?

Talk about the native Mac OS X browser.

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greg57
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by greg57 »

I don't quite agree with you Drayon. I used Camino a looooong time ago before switching to Safari, Chrome, and recently Firefox for its history and tab syncing capabilities. And I'm back to Camino since last night, when I saw I could run Windows 7 and Linux BackTrack with Virtualbox - along with OSX Lion - on a 4GB MB Air. And yes it's possible, but then you want the lightest possible browser for OSX cause memory starts being an issue. It's all fine for me if it runs on Webkit as long as its RAM footprint remains as low as possible.
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cflawson
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by cflawson »

Drayon wrote:I don't see any point in Camino being Webkit from the end user POV. We have more than enough Webkit browsers that cover every use. OmniWeb and iCab cover the advanced end of the market while Safari and Chrome cover the overly simple beginner market. On the Gecko platform we only have only two browsers, Firefox being the advanced and Camino the simple browser. The problem that I have is that Firefox is a disaster from a design perspective, it may be fine on Windows but it's a repugnant piece of junk on the Mac and for me is unusable even with the million hacks.


What, and iCab is a paragon of WebKit design elegance? :-p Of the four WebKit browsers you just mentioned, only OmniWeb really looks and feels like a true Mac application. Safari still strikes me as Apple's UI playground, Chrome is hideous, and iCab is hideous-er.

Frankly, I'm not sure that rendering engine matters much any more, but if you were going to pick one to start from scratch with right now, I think WebKit would be the one to pick.

When issues arise only Gecko browsers work correctly so we have Camino that comes to the rescue.

I don't dispute the idea that a lot of lazy developers only check their code in IE, but I'd love to know some concrete examples of sites that *only* work properly in Camino (or Firefox) among all Mac or iOS browsers. In about six years of being active in the Tech Evangelism side of things, I've seen exactly zero.

cl
Drayon
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by Drayon »

Drayon wrote:I don't see any point in Camino being Webkit from the end user POV. We have more than enough Webkit browsers that cover every use. OmniWeb and iCab cover the advanced end of the market while Safari and Chrome cover the overly simple beginner market. On the Gecko platform we only have only two browsers, Firefox being the advanced and Camino the simple browser. The problem that I have is that Firefox is a disaster from a design perspective, it may be fine on Windows but it's a repugnant piece of junk on the Mac and for me is unusable even with the million hacks.


cflawson wrote:What, and iCab is a paragon of WebKit design elegance? :-p Of the four WebKit browsers you just mentioned, only OmniWeb really looks and feels like a true Mac application. Safari still strikes me as Apple's UI playground, Chrome is hideous, and iCab is hideous-er.


Never used Chrome, but i'll take your word for that. While iCab ain't pretty, I wasn't specifically comparing the Webkit browsers based on their elegance of design. The point was (I obviously have to repeat it), that iCab is a simple minimal browser, OmniWeb and iCab are complex with advanced features with the Webkit engine. Camino is like Safari in this respect, it is a minimal browser but it differentiates it self by the nature of the Gecko engine. FireFox isn't cocoa and it's more of a dogs breakfast and can't be classes as either advance of minimal in terms of functionality. Camino becoming Webkit is quite pointless because it offers nothing that Safari doesn't already cover. I agree Safari isn't the perfect cocoa example but I still rate it as a decent cocoa app. Camino would need to do some things different to Safari, perhaps add a sidebar with vertical tabs similar to the sidebar in Preview.app where the display can be thumbnails or textual table of contents. It may want to gain site preferences in the way that OmniWeb does it with a sheet that slides up for each page (similar to web inspector).

Maybe Camino should take over the Firefox project for the Mac and sort that POS out. Redesign the GUI properly like a normal cocoa app using the existing feature set, only adding more Mac specific stuff, like oh, 'Next Tab', 'Previous Tab' menu items in the Window menu for a start. Give it a sidebar for Vertical Tabs and Site Preferences. The render engine is needed but the app itself is a disaster.

cflawson wrote:Frankly, I'm not sure that rendering engine matters much any more, but if you were going to pick one to start from scratch with right now, I think WebKit would be the one to pick.


Makes no sense to have yet another Webkit browser. That would make it 5 Webkit browsers (only 1 I consider usable fulltime-OmniWeb) and 1 Gecko browser which isn't cocoa, Frankenfox.

Drayon wrote:When issues arise only Gecko browsers work correctly so we have Camino that comes to the rescue.


cflawson wrote:I don't dispute the idea that a lot of lazy developers only check their code in IE, but I'd love to know some concrete examples of sites that *only* work properly in Camino (or Firefox) among all Mac or iOS browsers.


I'm wrestling with one as we speak. Webkit browsers won't display text links where pages are coded with image links and use text links as alternatives 'alt' when images are disable or not loaded in the page. Webkit renders blank space with no indication a link exists. Supposedly, Webkit will do this if the width and height are specified, but that causes other issues such as if the text link takes up more space than the image.

example code <img src="/style_emoticons/default/btsmall.gif" alt="[Torrent]" title="[Torrent]" class="icon" />

Camino and Firefox correctly display the alternative text links when the images are not loaded.

Here are some screenshot examples:
Rendered with images loaded in iCab. Notice the little BT, Magnet and Donkey icons on the left, they are the image links (code above represents only the first image (BT).
Image

Now lets look at how Camino presents the page with images 'disabled' (about:config-permissions.default.image;2)
Notice the image links are gone but the alternative textual links are rendered as the alternatives.
Image

Finally, lets check out iCab with images disabled the result being the same for all Webkit browsers. Others tested on my system are Safari and OmniWeb (no apologies that I don't do google stuff).
Wow, not images, normal but where are the text link alternatives? Meh, nothing shows up as a replacement for the image links, not even a tooltip with a link when hovering over the area. You'd be forgiven for thinking there was meant to be content here.
Image
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cflawson
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by cflawson »

The specific example you quote there is definitely an edge case, and its "intended" behaviour is hardly a settled matter. In the article you linked in your previous post, I most preferred the IE behaviour, but none of them are demonstrably "wrong" within the confines of current standards, if I read things correctly. (In the screenshots above, I agree that Gecko's behaviour makes the most sense.)

Furthermore, the specific scenario you're asking browsers to fix is even *more* of an edge case -- it requires either a problematic network connection (which, presumably, a webmaster would want to fix and would be a temporary problem at best) or a conscious user choice to disable image rendering (which can't possibly account for more than a fraction of a percent of all non-sight-impaired browser users). Picking a rendering engine based on that one behaviour doesn't seem like the best way to ensure that a browser provides the best experience to the most users.

There may be a handful of specific cases where Gecko is superior to WebKit. There are certainly specific cases where WebKit is superior to Gecko. The bottom line is that Mozilla-The-Company has effectively made it impossible for any browser other than Firefox to use the Gecko rendering engine and sticking with an ancient, insecure, inferior (but embeddable!) version of Gecko is not a sustainable software development model. If Camino is to have a future *at all*, it's very likely not going to be with Gecko and, barring a major change of heart on the part of the higher-ups at MoCo, Firefox is going to continue being as cross-platform as possible and Gecko will continue to be non-embeddable.

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aragorn_499
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by aragorn_499 »

Let me just say: I hope that Camino has a future. After trying Safari for the past year, with a short stint with Chrome, I'm back to Camino. It remains my favorite browser. And I honestly can't tell you why. :)
HenriHudson
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by HenriHudson »

alexgo wrote:Maybe you should start a fundraiser through kickstarter or something?


=D> =D> =D>

HH
David Munch
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by David Munch »

HenriHudson wrote:
alexgo wrote:Maybe you should start a fundraiser through kickstarter or something?


=D> =D> =D>

HH

Given the number of free browsers on the market, I don't think that would raise much money. Also, you would need enough raised to pay one guy full time for an extended periode.
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cflawson
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by cflawson »

David Munch wrote:
HenriHudson wrote:
alexgo wrote:Maybe you should start a fundraiser through kickstarter or something?


=D> =D> =D>

HH

Given the number of free browsers on the market, I don't think that would raise much money. Also, you would need enough raised to pay one guy full time for an extended periode.

Specifically, you'd need to be able to offer a competitive salary to someone already well-versed in Objective-C development, and that probably means somewhere on the order of US$80000, at a minimum, for one year.

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HenriHudson
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by HenriHudson »

cflawson wrote:
alexgo wrote:Maybe you should start a fundraiser through kickstarter or something?

(..)
Specifically, you'd need to be able to offer a competitive salary to someone already well-versed in Objective-C development, and that probably means somewhere on the order of US$80000, at a minimum, for one year.

cl


So US$10 per 8000 users would do the trick for one year. Or US$20 / 4000 users.
Is there a way to know how many Camino users there are out there?

HH
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JB
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by JB »

I'd give $20.00 per year to keep Camino, as long as I can continue to use "Caminicon" to customize the icons.
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LarsS
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by LarsS »

Here's another user that just really hopes this browser will continue to live.
skykingj45
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by skykingj45 »

I've donated before and will again--here's another vote for Camino.
jwthomas
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by jwthomas »

I'd certainly pay $20 a year for Camino, but I strongly suspect that there aren't enough real Camino enthusiasts to sustain a pledge drive. And there are too many issues around who gets the money if the drive fails.
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casey451
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by casey451 »

jwthomas wrote:I'd certainly pay $20 a year for Camino, but I strongly suspect that there aren't enough real Camino enthusiasts to sustain a pledge drive. And there are too many issues around who gets the money if the drive fails.


No issues. Just one question: where to have the day-weeklong party for everybody who's given heart and soul to this worthy project for too many years with no compensation.
commenter
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Re: Long term future of Camino?

Post by commenter »

Hopefully H.264 will be backported if nothing else...
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