Mozilla's Camino, the lightweight Mac alternative to Firefox, is getting very close to a 2.0 release. The first release candidate is out now -- you can download it by checking for updates in an earlier version of the browser -- and it's got updates to appearance, security features and more. You'll notice a new, more Leopard-like look for the tabs and toolbars, making Camino blend in better with recent versions of OS X.

One of the best additions to the new version of Camino is a built-in Flash blocker. You can turn it on to block all Flash animations, and then add exceptions the sites whose Flash you actually want to see. Other security features include making use of Google Safe Browsing, which warns you when you're headed for a site that Google has blacklisted for malware or phishing. All-in-all, Camino 2 isn't as feature-packed as Firefox, or as pretty as Safari, but it's lighter than either one (and offers Firefox-equivalent page-load times using Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine).

[via TechCrunch]

I'm in love. With a browser.

Nope, it's not Firefox, and not Safari, though I've had flings with both in the past. Not Camino, not even Chrome.

My new thing is with Minefield, from Mozilla. Okay, so Minefield is essentially an early build of the next version of Firefox. But the latest version has a drastically improved Javascript engine under the hood. Is it fast? Let me tell you - it's crazy fast. In fact, Ars Technica is reporting that Minefield is 10% faster than Google Chrome.

Faster than Chrome, available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and oh - it supports your Firefox add-ins, as long as you're willing to force compatibility using Nightly Tester Tools. Minefield is an alpha release, so it's likely to still be buggy. So far I've been lucky though; all of the add-ins that I've activated have worked fine right out of the gate.

Let me guess, you're in love now too, eh? Well, there's more than enough Minefield to go around. Go get some. Minefield, that is.

[via Ubuntu Unleashed]

Camino is the dark horse in the Mac browser competition. It's the faster, lighter little brother to Firefox, and there's a solid base of users who prefer it over Firefox and Safari. Camino uses the same Gecko rendering engine that Firefox is built on, but its focus is on a speedy user experience instead of maximum extensibility. With the preview of version 2.0, just released, Camino has added and tweaked some things to make the browsing experience even better.

Despite some rumors that Camino would be switching to Webkit, the rendering engine shared by Safari and Google Chrome, the browser is stick with Gecko. Version 2 updates Camino to the latest version of Gecko, which should improve its ability to handle flash. It also improves support for web standards, scoring a 71 on the Acid3 test (that's the same as Firefox 3.)

In terms of new features, there's a "tab overview" mode that shows thumbnails of all your tabs. This is a big plus if you're someone who keeps a huge number of sites open at once. There's also a new menu within the browser history that shows your recently-closed pages, so you can get back if you closed something by accident. What's more, full content zoom allows you to shrink or magnify an entire page, not just the text size. All in all, a solid improvement for Camino.

Although no release date for the Linux and OS X variants of Chrome has been announced, some details about the Mac version of Chrome are starting to emerge.

Yesterday, Amanda Walker, a Google software engineer, laid out some of the basics on the Official Google Mac Blog.

While individuals who excel at Mac development are building the Mac version of Chrome (and Linux developers are focusing on the Linux version), the different platforms are not operating on different teams -- everyone is part of the same group and working off of the same Chromium source tree.

As I discussed earlier, Chromium is available for developers to build on OS X -- the UI layer does not exist right now, but you can run tests in the TestShell.

When it comes to a release date for either Mac or Linux, Amanda won't give an estimate. In the blog entry, she writes, "we're not setting an artificial date for when they'll be ready--we simply can't predict enough to make a solid estimate." Fair enough, though obviously lots of Mac and Linux fans hope that it is sooner rather than later.

More details, at least about who is working on the Mac version, have also started to emerge. Mike Pinkerton, the project leader for Camino, posted in his blog that he is working on the Chromium project as a Mac developer. For anyone unfamiliar with Camino, it is a native OS X Gecko browser. Think the rendering engine of Firefox 2, with the interface and Cocoa-goodness of Safari. Up until FireFox 3, Camino was pretty much the only Gecko-based browser I used on my Mac. Interestingly, Pinkerton's former co-lead on the Camino project, Dave Hyatt, currently works at Apple on the Safari and WebKit teams.

Knowing how successfully the Camino team adapted Gecko to OS X, this gives me a lot of confidence in Chrome for OS X.

Besides having one of the coolest names for an app that we've seen in a while, CookieThief is pretty handy if you're thinking about switching to the sexy, lightweight Mac browser Camino. Sure, a lot of people prefer Camino's speedy, no-frills browsing experience to flashier, more bloated browsers like Firefox and Safari, but Camino apparently forgot one handy little feature for switchers: moving your cookies over from your old browser.

Retyping those passwords is a pain, so you can use CookieThief to steal all your login cookies from Safari and put them right into Camino. No fuss, no muss, just cookies. We'll admit this is an app with a pretty limited scope, and you'll probably only use it once, but if you can't be bothered to do it yourself, it might be just what you're looking for. (Oh, and if you happen to be going from Camino to Safari, CookieThief can copy your cookies that way, too!)

Camino 1.6 is now out in the wild, and it looks to be the release a lot of people were waiting for. With many new features as well as many updated features, Camino 1.6 is an excellent and compelling alternative to Safari and Firefox on the Mac.

New to Camino 1.6:

• Toolbar Search Improvements: The toolbar search in Camino can now be edited and customized, with the ability to delete, rename, and reorder search engines. Camino also supports OpenSearch plug-ins.
• Streamlined Find Interface: No more Find panel in Camino 1.6. Instead, a simple Find toolbar will appear when you need it at the bottom of the browser window (this feature is very similar to Safari's inline search, though Safari's find toolbar appears on the top).
• Tabbed Browsing Improvements: Camino 1.6 now includes a scrolling tab bar. If more tabs are open than can be displayed in the tab bar, you'll see arrows on the right and left edge that will allow you to scroll through the tabs.
• Integrated Software Update: Using the "Sparkle" framework, Camino now has an auto-update feature.

There are also many improved features in Camino 1.6, including AppleScript support, feed detection, and spell checking.

The big improvement in Camino 1.6 for many users has to be the updated keychain support, which now stores information for multiple accounts in the Keychain. And, as always, Camino will automatically block pop-ups, ads, and animations.

You owe it to yourself to download Camino 1.6 and take it for a test run. It might just be the best browser on the Mac. Agree? Disagree? Spell it out in the comments.

[via Mozilla Links]

GrowlCamino is a plugin for the Camino web browser that posts Growl notifications during or after certain browser activities.

The Growl program is a universal notifier that delivers on-the-screen information for a number of Mac applications. Some programs, such as Adium and Firefox, are supported right out of the box. Others, like Camino, are not.

That's where the GrowlCamino plugin comes in.

Currently, GrowlCamino posts notifications for these events by default:

• Download Started (opens Downloads window)
• Short Download Complete (opens downloaded file)
• Download Complete (opens downloaded file)
• Download Failed (opens Downloads window)
• Popup blocked (opens relevant tab)
• Bookmarks Imported
• Bookmarks Exported

GrowlCamino also installs its own Preference Pane, with the option to suppress the Camino Downloads window and the option to turn off Camino's popup blocker notifications.

GrowlCamino 1.5 has just been released in beta; it requires Mac OS X.

[Via Softpedia]

Mozilla has been busy in Patch-land (you know, the place right next to Never-Never land?), and Firefox 3 is almost one step closer to complete.

Today Mozilla has released updates to both its Firefox and Camino web browser. Firefox 2.0.0.12 stomps out a reported 11 bugs, including one that posed a security threat to users who had installed any of the add-ons for the open-source browser. Camino 1.5.5 includes an update of the Gecko rendering engine and improves blocking of Flash animations and ad-blocking, among other fixes.

The updates can be downloaded from the browser's respective websites or from the browser's built-in updaters.

These new updates come along with news of the Firefox Beta 3 release date, which is pegged as February 11, next Monday. It has also been decided that a Beta 4 will be released later this month (tentatively scheduled for February 26) due to Mozilla's desire to clean up the Windows, Linux and Mac OSX themes and overall visual look.

For those who have never had the pleasure, Camino is an open source browser based on the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox, but built to integrate much better with Mac OS X. Right out of the box Camino has a much more Mac look and feel, and under the hood it has integrated better with Mac OS X by doing things like storing web passwords in the Mac OS X Keychain (a centralized, secured and backup-friendly database where all Mac OS X apps store passwords). With the release of Camino 1.5, new features and even more integration can be had, such as:

• The spell checking feature now uses the built-in, system-wide Mac OS X dictionary for checking spelling and storing custom words
• Storing passwords in the Keychain now fully integrates with Safari, allowing both browsers to recognize, store and share the same password entries
• Session saving ensures your tabs and windows are restored right back to where you left them, even after a crash
• Feed detection allows Camino to pass RSS feeds on to your default reader
• A more powerful and obvious pop-up blocking system, giving you control over whether you show pop-ups from a specific site once, always or never
• The ability to trash downloaded files directly from the Downloads Manager window

While Camino doesn't support Firefox's popular extensions, it does have a healthy plug-in community at PimpMyCamino for those who might still need a little extra oomph from the open source, Mozilla-based browser. Camino 1.5 can be had from CaminoBrowser.org.

We last mentioned the Shiira web browser for Macs in August of last year, when the first beta iteration of Shiira 2.0 was released. Since then,Shiira 2.0 has hit full release status, and is succeeding at fulfilling its mission statement: "Shiira is a web browser based on Web Kit and written in Cocoa. The goal of the Shiira Project is to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari. All source code used in this software is publicly available." (Emphasis added.)

So, what's to like about Shiira? Firstly, it looks fantastic, and seems to belong on the Mac desktop. Firefox has come a long way in terms of looking more like an actual Mac app when running on a Mac, but it doesn't approach the seamless Mac look and feel provided by Safari, whereas Shiira does.

Probably one of the best things about using Safari on a Mac is how speedy it is at rendering pages compared to most other browsers, and most notably the pokey Firefox. Shiira may not be quite as quick as Safari, but it's definitely in Safari's class; you won't notice much of a difference between the two.

Shiira's claim to fame is the natural way it handles tabs, whether you choose the new Page Dock interface or the more traditional tabs. Shiira was clearly designed from the ground up as a tabbed browser, and it shows. In addition to elegant handling of tabs, Shiira throws in a bit of bling: you can hit F8 to show an Expose-style view of your open tabs. Our favorite feature of Shiira is the full-screen mode. You can hit Option-Command-F and switch to a kiosk-like full screen mode, showing absolutely no browser chrome at all. Great stuff.

Shiira is a free Mac download.

A complaint about FIrefox I hear often from Mac users is that it doesn't really "fit" Mac OS X. Its default theme isn't very "Mac-ish," the default form widgets are fugly, and so on. Some Mac users live with it, others use Camino, the Firefox-based Mac-native browser, and some of them just stick with Safari. There are a few things a Firefox-on-Mac user can do to feel more at home, though, and Ronald Heft, Jr. has collected them and written a short tutorial on his blog. Though it's a partial solution at best, Heft does point out that Firefox 3.0 for Mac will be a native Cocoa app and much of this will be but a hazy memory.

Folks I've tried 'em all, del.icio.us, Furl, even my .Mac's ability to sync Safari bookmarks online... And what I've wound up with is a mishmash of bookmarks all over creation, some with tags, some without. I don't know if WebnoteHappy is the ultimate answer, as it doesn't necessarily push the list to the web (more on this in a minute), but it does have a lot to offer. For instance, I switch around to different browsers for different things. I use Firefox to blog, Safari to research, Opera to just surf junk, Camino for blogging sometimes, Flock for research sometimes, etc. WebnoteHappy keeps all of my bookmarks in one central location, and with bookmarklets or a hotkey, I'm able to send a URL to the app. It's kinda like syncronizing your bookmarks within one machine as those bookmarks are then accessible system-wide. The organization tools are great too, working much like iTunes. There's good tagging support, and the ability to talk to NetNewsWire, still my most used RSS reader. Now as for publishing online (for use on other machines), I can either try to move my bookmarks back into Safari (there's a merge feature) and sync with .Mac, or export my bookmarks file (the app provides a couple of ways to do this) and send it upstream...

Today saw the final release of Camino 1.0, the OS X-native Mozilla-based open source browser. The latest version includes download pause and resume, pop-up blocking, auto form fill, and more. I know a number of Mac users who swear by Camino above all other browsers. Head over to the Camino site to take a look.

[Via Digg]

Camino, the OS X-native browser from the Mozilla people, and a popular alternative to Firefox, has finally hit the integers. Yesterday Camino 1.0 alpha was released and the list of changes since 0.9 is intimidating. Mac users go ahead and download it.

Via TUAW.