Feeling courageous?
In the early days of
Mac OS X, their were very few choices as far as
web browsers were concerned, and they all left a
lot to be desired. Internet Explorer was the
choice of most, as it came pre-installed with the
operating system. Netscape had just spun off the
Mozilla code, but the Suite was a big, bloated mess.
All the cool people were using a browser
called OmniWeb, not so much for it's
functionality, but rather for its looks.
OmniWeb was a cocoa
application, built specifically for OS X. It
gave us a taste of how nicely applications can
blend in with the look and feel of the system,
but eventually it had to be rebuilt from
scratch, and added a $30 price tag as well.
Realizing that the newly open sourced Mozilla
code and Gecko rendering engine had a
lot of promise, two guys (and I believe former
Netscape employees) named Mike Pinkerton and Dave Hyatt (Hyatt is now the
lead Safari developer) decided to build a
browser-only application, based on the
Mozilla/Gecko rendering engine under the hood,
but with a Mac interface. Originally called
Chimera, this project has
attracted a very passionate group of volunteer
hackers and end users over the last few years.
Hyatt eventually was recruited by Apple, but
Pink and company have remained committed to
building the best browser on the Mac platform,
releasing version 1.0 earlier this year.
I've been a big fan of Chimera/Camino from the
very beginning, testing nightly builds and
reporting bugs. I even developed a work-around
for a java-related bug that existed on OSX 10.1,
not bad for a non-developer. But I always wanted
to learn how to compile Camino myself, and thanks
to a group of very patience folks from the
Camino forum at Mozillazine,
I've accomplished this feat.
Ironically, this same group of people were
involved in trying to improve the Camino
developer documentation, and sometimes it's hard
for software developers to think like normal
human beings. For every question I had,
information on the wiki was added or adjusted
based on the questions I was asking, resulting
in what I believe to be fairly clear build
instructions. As I became confident that my
builds were stable for every day use, I
decided to post them to my .Mac site so that other members
of the Camino community could take part in the
testing of these builds.
These builds are compiled on a MacBook Pro, and
are for Intel processor machines only. They will
not run on a PPC-equipped machine, so don't even
try. They use a customized build configuration
file with special (experimental) optimizations
for the Intel processors. They are compiled every
day, so the possibility exists that newly checked-in code can cause
instability in the app. I always do some quick
testing before uploading to make sure the app
launches, renders some sites, and doesn't
crash, so you can feel somewhat confident
using it. I would recommend backing up your
profile (~/Library/Application Support/Camino)
though just in case. So, if you've got a new
machine and like living on the bleeding edge,
feel free to test these experimental nightly
builds of Camino, and feel free to leave
comments below on your experiences. Just click
on the banner above to download, and be sure
to choose the most recent build.
BTW, this reminds me of another subject, which is
actually related. Camino, like the majority of
software for OSX, is packaged in a file called a
disk image. Disk image files end with the .dmg
extension. When a disk image is downloaded, your
browser hands this file off to an application
called DiskImageMounter (unless you have turned
OFF automatic opening of files in your browser
prefs. In this case, you would double-click the
.dmg file to mount it), and the image is mounted.
An icon appears on the Desktop that looks like a
hard drive (it IS a virtual drive), and usually a
Finder window will open as well, showing the
contents of the image (again, if a window doesn't
open, double-click the drive icon). If the
contents of the image is the application,
installation consists of dragging the application
icon from the image to your Applications folder.
Do NOT double-click an application icon from
inside a disk image. Once you have dragged the
app to /Applications and it's finished copying
itself, you Eject the image (either by clicking
the Eject triangle in the Finder window,
right-clicking the drive icon on the Desktop and
choosing Eject, or by simply dragging the drive
icon to the Trash). You can then trash the .dmg
file as well and any other files that may have
been associated with the download (i.e. - .zip
files, .bin files, etc.).
There is an exception to this rule. If the
contents of the image is an Installer (a
yellowish package icon, a .pkg extension, or the
words Installer), you can double-click and run
from the disk image. But if you mount a disk
image and you see the icon of the app you just
downloaded, then just drag it to
/Applications.
Onyx gets an update
It's not often that I write about 3rd party software on this site, but Onyx is one of those programs that should be in every Mac users Applications folder. I've used Onyx since the early days of OSX, and this little utility has continued to grow and evolve, adding new features but always remaining simple to use and easy to understand. The developers have also maintained support for previous versions of X by providing separate versions of Onyx for Tiger, Panther, and Jaguar. Click on the logo above for download information, and be sure to read the reviews by fellow Mac users at both MacUpdate and Versiontracker, and see for yourself why Onyx is the ONE utility Mac users can't live without.
