This was out nearly one week but I haven't got the chance to grab it. I've been a long time supporter of Camino, one of the few original Mac browsers. It first came out as Chimera before Firefox (Phoenix) even existed and I've always kept it updated all these years, foregoing the official release builds and skip straight to the latest stable beta and sometimes even the latest nightly build.
Going from 1.0 to 2.0 will have been quite a long journey unlike Firefox who shot through four major releases since 2004. Camino skipped through from 0.1 to 0.7 in under a year but took 4 years to get to 1.0, and two more years to get to the current 1.6 and will be nearly 3 years to 2.0.
This past week the Camino team pushed out 2.0 beta 1. Since I've had very little problems with Camino alpha and beta releases, I hold no qualms about replacing Camino 2.0a1 despite their warning and disclaimer about it being unstable and unsuitable or daily use especially when they have these updates spelled out in the release notes:
Camino 2.0b1
- Tab Dragging: Tabs can be rearranged by dragging and dropping.
- Tab Overview: There is now an optional toolbar icon for opening and closing Tab Overview.
- Blocking Flash Animations: A new exceptions list allows disabling "Block Flash animations" on a per-site basis.
- Gecko 1.9: Camino 2.0 Beta 1 includes changes that improve stability on Mac OS X 10.4.
- Downloading: On Mac OS X 10.5, the downloads folder in the Dock will bounce when a download finishes.
Camino 2.0a1- Requires Mac OS X 10.4: Camino 2.0 Alpha 1 now requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.
- Tab Overview: The tab overview feature, accessed from the Window menu, displays a thumbnail grid of all tabs in the current window.
- Recently Closed Pages: The History menu now contains a sub-menu listing the last 20 closed web pages.
- Complete Keyboard Loop: The keyboard loop in the main browser window has been completely rewritten, bringing keyboard access to the tab bar, the pop-up blocker, and the Find bar. The new keyboard loop also fixes most of the bugs that existed in the main browser window's keyboard loop.
- Full Content Zoom: This new zoom behavior adds the ability to scale up or down the entire content of a web page instead of just increasing or decreasing the text size. The default behavior of the ⌘+ and ⌘- shortcuts is now full content zoom, and increasing or decreasing text size can now be accessed with the ⌘⌥+ and ⌘⌥- shortcuts.
- Gecko 1.9: Camino now uses version 1.9 of the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine. This version includes a new graphics architecture based on Quartz, which delivers better compatibility with popular plug-ins and significant improvements in Flash performance. Gecko 1.9 also has enhanced support for web standards, improved handling of fonts and languages, and improved support for author styles on form controls.
Here's where you can grab the preview release. Read through the site and don't blame anyone but yourself if you lose something while using a non-official release. My only problem with Camino now is it seems to be slower than Safari 3.1. I haven't updated Safari to 3.2. Also, I don't exactly use Safari, I use
WebKit, which is the open-source non-official version of Safari.
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