News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

November 26, 2007

software

Donate to the Camino project

Posted Nov. 26, ’07, 7:37 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Software

Donate Prior to the Leopard upgrade, I had switched my main browser to OmniWeb, and then later Camino. I decided I’d return to Safari to see how I like it after all this time. So far, so good, but I’m still concerned about sluggishness. I never worried about that with Camino, no matter how many tabs I had open. It remained lightning fast on all my Macs.

It remains to be the Mac focused jewel of Mozilla’s product offerings. I know a few readers and even a few writers for the site love Firefox. As far as I’m concerned, it’s oogly. It neither looks or feels like a Mac application. For some, that’s acceptable, but I’m a purist of sorts. Camino has the same rendering engine in Firefox in a sleek, fast package.

If you’ve used Camino, I’m sure you have a special place in your heart for it even if you don’t use it. If you haven’t, you should. You should also donate to the project. For a limited time, the Mozilla Foundation will match every one dollar you donate with two more. By donating $10, you’re really donating $30. And it’s tax deductible.

I highly recommend donating by the end of the year when this matching ends. It’s really important because Mozilla has recently shown its intent to discard anything not a cash cow Firefox by dumping Thunderbird into a separate company (which was quickly followed by the departure of the two full time devs assigned to the project). I don’t want Camino to be next on the chopping block.


6 Comments

Moe Author Profile Page said:

I love me some good Camino. Great browser for my needs. I will definitely be donating some money. Come on, in the spirit of the season, lets throw a few dollars for our open source fellows!

November 26, 2007 8:25 AM
Daniel Author Profile Page said:

I use Camino quite a bit and greatly enjoy it, so I'm going to be donating as well. However, in light of Mozilla's willingness to kill off Thunderbird, I'm a little worried that the donations could be appropriated, ultimately, for another project should Mozilla decide to kill Camino despite interest/donations. Per the FAQ's on their website:

"Donations that are given to a specific project will be used by the Mozilla Foundation to fund activities related to that project. The Mozilla Foundation may use any directed donation for other purposes if the Board of Directors is unable to find suitable activities to fund for a project, if a project becomes inactive or otherwise becomes ineligible to receive funds."

Unless I'm missing something....

November 26, 2007 11:51 AM
Sridhar said:

I have been using Safari 3 beta 3 on Tiger, I think for quite some time and it is very fast. I usually have upwards of 100 tabs open in 8-10 browser windows and it is still fast.
OTOH, Camino has been quite slow on my machine. I don't know what the deal is.

Safari does take up a lot of virtual memory and becomes slow after many sleep wake cycles if there are more than a hundred tabs and I have to restart it after a few days.

But, I guess it changes from system to system. On that note, Firefox 3 beta (Minefield) is somewhat fast, but not as fast as Safari

November 26, 2007 11:54 AM
Weili said:

I've used Camino before it was even 1.0 :)

The ONLY reason I don't use Firefox is because the lack of a true Mac UI. However, if you've used Firefox 3.0 beta, you'd know that the next version WILL have Mac UI. Maybe I'll switch then as FF seem to offer more in terms of featuers :(

November 26, 2007 2:09 PM
Shawn Wilsher said:

Camino is a community project, and thus a Mozilla Foundation project, not a Mozilla Corporation project. The Mozilla Foundation hasn't "dumped" Thunderbird, but Mozilla Corporation has started to shift its focus away from it. Please read up more on the situation before making some of the assumptions that you did. I'm a Thunderbird user and I'm happy for the project now that it will have a new home dedicated to it.

November 26, 2007 2:21 PM
Derik said:

Shawn, I have been reading up on it and I'm not being taken for a fool by Mozilla's corporate speak. If Thunderbird can't find its own funding, it's dead. The two main developers have already left.

If you want to believe Mozilla is giving Thunderbird room to flap its wings and fly, that's cool, I'm just not naive.

November 26, 2007 5:19 PM

Leave a comment

 



Visit other IDG sites: