Camino previews new browser tools

Posted on 23 Oct 2008 at 11:43

The Camino Project has released a first preview of Camino 2, its Mozilla-based browser for Mac OS X.

The new version is built on the latest version of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, which is the technology that underpins Firefox 3. Gecko 1.9 provides a new graphics architecture for better compatibility with plug-ins and significant improvements in Flash performance. It also has enhanced support for web standards as well as improved handling of fonts and languages.

The principle change, as far as Camino’s interface is concerned, is the implementation of the Tab Overview feature (see screenshot). Accessed via a keyboard shortcut, it present a grid view of all the open tabs in the foremost window.

Keyboard access is one shortcoming of previous releases that is being addressed in the new version. A rewriting of keystroke handling fixes pre-existing bugs and provides keyboard access to the tab bar, the pop-up blocker and the Find bar.

Camino 2 also implements full-page zoom as an option to just scaling the text up and down with the command-plus and command-hyphen shortcuts. Incidentally, this feature is also being tested in nightly WebKit builds of Safari.

Camino 2.0 Alpha 1 is available from preview.caminobrowser.org, though the developers warn that it may be unstable and not suitable for day-to-day use. Known issues are listed in the release notes.

Author: Simon Aughton

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