Releases:2.1b1:Notes

About Camino® 2.1 Beta 1

Camino 2.1 Beta 1 is the second preview release of the next upgrade to the popular Mac OS X browser using Mozilla.org’s Gecko HTML rendering engine. Notable improvements include improved control over plug-ins, overhauled location bar autocomplete, a new history backend, the ability to hide the status bar, and enhanced support for web standards provided by the Gecko rendering engine.

Note that Camino 2.1 Beta 1 is in the “beta” stage, which means that it is close to its final shipping state. We feel that it is usable on a day-to-day basis and a large improvement over Camino 2.0, but you may still experience issues and some functionality may not work entirely as intended. The goal of this preview release is to demonstrate the team’s progress and to allow users to report problems before the final release.

Camino 2.1 Beta 1 shares the same code base as Firefox 3.6, both being based on version 1.9.2 of Gecko, and thus shares many of the security fixes and Gecko improvements that are in that version of Firefox.

Camino 2.1 Beta 1 is available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later.

Features in Camino 2.1 Beta 1

The following changes and improvements have been made since the Camino 2.1 Alpha 1 release.

General

• Camino will now load plug-ins from the profile’s Internet Plug-Ins folder.
• Some simple Gecko extensions (e.g., “Do Not Track“) can now be made to work with Camino.
• Using full-screen Netflix streaming no longer crashes Camino.
• When another application asks Camino to open a URL, Camino will no longer try to open URLs with protocols it is not able to handle.
• Find-as-You-Type will no longer select composed characters that are typed in rich text input fields when autostart is on.
• Camino now supports opening .filelocs from the Open dialog and via drag-and-drop to tabs and the tab bar.
• Saving as “HTML Complete” no longer fails when users include a forward slash in the filename.
• It is now possible to change the extension of a file being saved.

Bookmarks & History

• The most common bookmark import sources are now listed first in the Import Bookmarks pop-up menu.
• Camino now replaces control characters in bookmark titles when creating bookmarks by dragging to the Bookmarks Bar.
• Improved the compatibility of HTML bookmark export files.
• It is now possible to drag a plain-text bookmark shortcut URL to the Bookmarks Bar to create a new bookmark shortcut.
• The History view no longer shows empty History folders after the last non-empty folder.

Localization

• More of the messages that Camino displays can be localized for languages other than English.

Preferences

• The “Enable Java” preference in the Web Features pane is disabled if no Java plug-in is installed on a user’s Mac.

Tabs

• Links from other applications now default to opening new tabs.
• Standalone SVG files once again display in Tab Overview.

User Interface

• Autocomplete results are now displayed as a single list, using an improved ranking algorithm.
• Improved the speed of autocomplete when refining an existing query.
• Capital letters in search terms no longer cause autocomplete to return zero results.
• Improved keyboard navigation in the location bar and the autocomplete window.

Web Page Interaction

• Camino now prevents loading of certain insecure or incompatible versions of common plug-ins.
• Camino no longer includes a Java plug-in; users who need Java should use the Java Plug-In 2 included with Java on Mac OS X or install the Java Embedding Plugin, depending on Mac OS X version.
• “Block Flash animations” is now enabled by default on PowerPC Macs because there is no secure version of the Flash plug-in available for PowerPC Macs.
• Upgraded the “Block Flash animations” code to use Flashblock 1.5.14.
• It is possible to override parts of Camino’s ad-blocking by adding appropriate CSS rules to the user_ad_blocking.css file located in the profile’s chrome folder.
• Improved ad-blocking.

Features in Camino 2.1 Alpha 1

The following changes and improvements have been made since the Camino 2.0 release.

General

• Uses version 1.9.2 of the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine.
  • Enhanced support for web standards.
  • Improved JavaScript performance.
• New “Work Offline” and “Go Online” items in the “Camino” menu allow Camino to enter offline mode and provide a more useful experience when no network connection is available.
• Camino will now speculatively look up DNS entries for links on web pages.
• Switched the AppleScript property for the page title to “name” from “title” in order to be more compatible with other browsers.

Bookmarks & History

• The location bar’s autocomplete function now searches bookmarks in addition to history.
• Autocomplete will now provide results based on page titles as well as page URLs.
• Site icons for Bookmarks and History will now display properly the first time they are loaded during a browsing session.
• Camino now uses SQLite-based history storage instead of the old Mork-based history storage.

Downloading

• Completed downloads for files that do not have a content-length header will no longer appear as canceled downloads after restarting Camino.
• The Downloads window now uses the correct selection colors.

Localization

• Google’s Safe Browsing information pages will now appear in Norwegian for users of the Norwegian localization.
• The “Import” button on the Open panel for selecting a bookmarks file to import is now localizable.
• The certificate error page is now localizable.
• The size units in Downloads window messages are now localizable.

Preferences

• Switched the order of the tabs in the Appearance preference pane.
• Removed the checkbox for “Always use my page and link colors” from the “Colors & Links” tab of the Appearance preference pane.
• Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) will display correctly in sheets requesting permission to set cookies.

Privacy & Security

• Switched to a friendlier, more informative certificate error page.

User Interface

• The autocomplete window has been redesigned and its appearance more closely resembles that of Safari.
• The status bar can now be hidden by choosing “Hide Status Bar” in “View” menu.
• Command-Arrow key combinations can now be reassigned as shortcuts for other menu items.
• On Mac OS X 10.5 and above, double-clicking on the splitter between the location bar and search field will collapse or expand the search field.
• The warning displayed when closing multiple windows will also report the number of tabs in the windows.
• The “Search” context menu item will now open search results in a new tab or window.
• The Bookmark Bar colors will again appear correctly on displays with a gamma other than 1.8.
• The extension portion of a suggested filename will no longer be selected in Save dialogs.
• The Dock menu will now display a bookmark’s URL if the bookmark has no title.
• “Page Info” and “Bookmark Info” have been renamed “Show Page Info” and “Show Bookmark Info” to adhere to Mac OS X command-naming conventions.
• Updated the appearance of error pages, directory listings, and browser diagnostic pages.
• Polished the appearance of many toolbar icons.
• Added “Unicode™ (UTF-16)” to the “Text Encoding” sub-menu.
• The lock and feed icons, if present, now appear in their own section of the location bar.
• The location bar and web search field now have accessibility descriptions.
• Many additional toolbar buttons and menu items are now only enabled when appropriate.

Web Page Interaction

• Core window and tab management keyboard shortcuts are now protected from being stolen by web pages.
• Java is now disabled by default; it can be re-enabled in the Web Features preference pane.
• The new “camino.disabled_plugin_names” hidden preference allows disabling arbitrary plug-ins.
• Placeholders for missing, disabled, and blocked plug-ins now appear as inline grey boxes in web pages.
• Upgraded the “Block flash animations” code to use Flashblock 1.5.13.
• Modernized the “click-to-play” icons used by the “Block flash animations” feature.
• Improved ad-blocking.

Known Issues

• The multi-touch “pinch” gesture to zoom a web page currently does not work if invoked over the web page.
• If “Ask me before accepting each cookie” is checked, Camino will display a cookie dialog for each cookie request from a web page.