Mike Pinkerton Issues Update on the State of CaminoSaturday January 10th, 2004Mike Pinkerton has posted an update on the state of Camino on his weblog. In the entry, Mike reports on the new review process, describes some recent improvements and outlines the short-term priorities for the future. "In the short term, history will get a rewrite" Maybe they should use the Gecko engine but a QT interface and then it would be more cross-platform. But, the whole point of Camino is that it uses the mac gui instead of emulating it through some other widget library. There used to be a QT interface. It was completely unmaintained for well over a year before it got CVS removed. If no one from the QT/KDE camp cares and the GNOME/GTK people do care, you end up with the code that the latter write, you know. I'm a little confused by the existence of Camino. There's barely room for one Gecko-based browser on MacOS and certainly no room for two. Could not Camino resources be better utilized on MacFirebird? In short, no. The "resources" (at least in terms of development) that Camino uses are not the Mozilla Foundation's. Mike Pinkerton and various other volunteers do the work, because they want to. So if Mozilla Foundation dumped Camino, there wouldn't be any more work getting done on Firebird. Whether it would be better to ignore Camino from a marketing point of view and focus on Firebird is something that could be argued, just in order to reduce confusion between products. But I don't think the benefits of that make it worth doing. Given what appear to be severely limited resources on the Firebird and even more so anything to do with MacOS Firebird, I don't understand how resources couldn't be helpful but whatever. This clearly doesn't look like a "mythical man month" situation. Yeah, that's exactly the other problem. I'm a Mac user and want to use Mozilla. What version should I use? Why are there so many to begin with? What are the chances of the version I select going away? The people working on Camino are working on it because they want a Mac Gecko-based browser WITHOUT A XUL UI. Firebird totally fails to fit that bill; they would not spend a minute of time on Firebird, because that's not the sort of browser they want to use. Now the question is why we have a MacOS Firebird given the existence of Camino. That part I've never _quite_ followed. "Given what appear to be severely limited resources on the Firebird and even more so anything to do with MacOS Firebird, I don't understand how resources couldn't be helpful" The point is that those resources aren't "transferable". There are volunteers who want, specifically, to work on something like Camino. If you don't have Camino, you lose those volunteers - Firebird doesn't gain from that. I think we're agreed about the marketing problem of having 3 different browsers on Mac OS and trying to explain the differences to people... I've heard that before but is it really true? Do people really prefer working on a browser that has a good likliehood of going away (Camino) rather than one than one with a shot at modest success (MacFirebird)? At a minimum, it's confusing to potential users (Which mozilla browser do I pick and gosh forbid I make the wrong choice? Gee, maybe I'll stick with Safari.). If it wasn't really true, then by your own statement, there wouldn't be anyone working on it. The fact that people are choosing to work on it proves that there are people that do prefer working on it. It's open source - there's no way it can "go away" as such - all that can happen is that people stop working on it, and obviously the people working on it are in full control of when that happens. I've already agreed that it's potentially confusing to new users. |