4 ms·
Slightly off-topic but John Gruber has been writing about the new version of Safari[1] (and it's tabs and how they do or don't work) - and he linked back to som
by rahoulb 5y ago
Slightly off-topic but John Gruber has been writing about the new version of Safari[1] (and it's tabs and how they do or don't work) - and he linked back to some posts of his about Camino, which I'd forgotten about.
Camino was the Gecko engine from Firefox in a "proper" Mac UI (unlike Firefox at the time, which was their cross-platform XUL UI). I used to use it as my primary browser and I really liked it.
What killed it was Apple launching Safari - which didn't use Gecko, but instead used KDEs QT-based HTML engine. They named it Webkit, Google later used it for Chrome - then forking it - and leading to the situation we have today where the two QT-derived engines (Blink and, because of iOS, Webkit) dominate.
Personally, I still use Firefox, mainly because I would like there to be another option, but I also use Safari (and I quite like the colour in the header thing).
[1] https://daringfireball.net/2021/10/the_tragedy_of_safari_15_quote_unquote_tabs https://daringfireball.net/2021/10/the_tragedy_of_safari_15_...
- batterylow 5y agoPart of that journey is visualised here https://plotapi.com/gallery/posts/showcase/desktop-browser-market-share-pie-fight/ https://plotapi.com/gallery/posts/showcase/desktop-browser-m...
- pram 5y agoI'm not sure how you arrive at Safari "killing" Camino. It was frankly always marginal. You had Mozilla, Firefox, and IE all available on OSX contemporaneously.
- neurobashing 5y agowell there's Dave Hyatt, co-creator of Camino, who left to work on Safari. That didn't help.
- gsnedders 5y agoI mean Hyatt is also co-creator of Firefox, and Firefox survived. (IIRC he also did the tabbing implementations for both Camino and Firefox!)
- rahoulb 5y agoNone of the others were Mac browsers - they all felt cross-platform. Camino felt like a Mac app - and was the only real choice for that until Safari came along.
- tgv 5y agoI still miss Camino's cmd-1, 2, ... short-cuts for items on the menu bar. What a great UI it had.
- ttepasse 5y agoIf you mean ⌘1, ⌘2 for activating the bookmarks in the favourites bar, you can still do that in Safari by “Use ⌘1 through ⌘2 to switch tabs” in Safari‘s preferences. Im still using this daily for bookmarklets – remember those?
- starik36 5y ago> I still use Firefox, mainly because I would like there to be another option I see people write that. But I use Firefox because I truly feel it's the best browser out there.
- loxias 5y agoI'm with you. I used to use Firefox for "everything but videos and gmail", which went in Chrome. But after v92 I think, I stopped going to Chrome for ... anything. My CPU has been happier!
- starik36 5y agoI actually prefer videos in Firefox because of picture in picture. But yeah, with Gmail in Firefox you've had to basically switch to HTML mode. It's gotten a lot better though in recent releases.
- Wevah 5y agoIIRC the real nail in the coffin for Camino was the phasing out of support for embedded Gecko. (I was a Camino dev.)
- rahoulb 5y agoThank you for your work. I enjoyed it.
- ksec 5y agoGecko wasn't really designed or made for embedding. For years using it without XUL has continue to be a struggle. Mozilla dropped support for embedding Gecko so Camino had to switch to WebKit, and in the end it just wasn't worth the effort given Camino offer no advantage to Safari using the same engine.