The Camino web browser has officially closed its doors after a decade of supplying an early, and stable, web browsing experience for Mac users before the advent of Safari.
It's dead and it's gone, and, according to its developers, that's probably a good thing.
"Camino is increasingly lagging behind the fast pace of changes on the web, and more importantly it is not receiving security updates, making it increasingly unsafe to use," Stuart Morgan, project leader for Camino, said in a blog post on Thursday. "Fortunately, Mac users have many more browsers to choose from than they did when Camino started ten years ago. Former Camino developers have helped build the three most popular - Chrome, Firefox, and Safari - so while this is the end of Camino itself, the community that helped build it is still making the web better for Mac users."
Camino came into the web browser foray during a period where Microsoft's Internet Explorer and OmniWeb were the dominate web browsers for the OS X, Apple's operating system.
Camino launched in February of 2002 (then going by the name "Chimera"), and was tightly integrated into the OS X ecosystem well before Apple's Safari browser launched. Camino's fast speed, open source background and use of system tools unique to Mac systems, like OS X Keychain, lead to its popularity. The now-defunct browser was based on Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, and quickly inspired a dedicated following.
But the growing lack of demand, and support, for the browser finally killed the web portal off. That death, according to PC Mag, can largely be attributed to the use of the WebKit rendering engine - a layout software engine allowing browsers to display web pages - surpassing the Gecko rendering engine in popularity.
But Camino's loss was the web's gain, as many of the Camino project's team members moved onto larger projects like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari.
"It was back in February 2005 that I first started helping the Camino project, first setting up a domain, then working to get their new website published. Camino got me involved in the Mozilla community, which eventually got me my job at Mozilla," Samuel Sidler Camino team coordinator and Mozilla Firefox project manager said in a blog post. "It's sad to think this browser that gave me so much is finally being laid to rest. But here we are, more than a decade after it was first created, saying goodbye."
