Camino Meet-up:2007:Notes

What follows is the abridged version of the notes taken at the 2007 Camino Meet-up in Mountain View, California. Note that any stats listed are as of June 15, 2007.

Attendees

cl, hwaara, jeff, josh, kreeger (1 day), ludo (1 day), peeja, pinkerton, smorgan, ss

Mission Statement

There has often been discussion about what Camino's focus is. We haven't clearly stated the mission of the Camino Project previously and thus wanted to spend some time focusing on a mission statement. After going through several iterations of a mission statement, we finalized on the following:

"Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users."

What We Aren't

Now that we've determined our mission statement, we know a lot about what we aren't.

• We're not a general purpose internet utility (i.e., an RSS reader, email client, news reader, etc.).
• We're not a complex application requiring documentation to understand.
• We're not everything to everyone (not simply Firefox with Cocoa controls)
• We're not Steve Jobs' browser
• We're not a development platform

Motivations

There are several motivations we have for creating Camino and continuing work on it.

• We have a very loyal user base of ~350,000 users, most of which are pre-1.5 (~150k downloads of 1.5 so far)
• We can control our own destiny and aren't controlled by external forces
• We believe that open systems are better than closed ones
  • Other browsers are controlled by large corporations, Camino is entirely volunteer and open source.
• We can innovate and differentiate
  • Innovate with things like Tabsposé
  • Differentiate with things like better tab handling, single window mode, better pop-up blocking, ad and flash blocking
• We can be more nimble
  • Not tied to OS schedules
  • We can (and should) release early and often
  • Shorter time to market
• Broader support
  • More OS versions
  • We care about people who have been left behind
• We're not evil
  • There's no hidden agenda
  • We're not gold diggers and aren't in it for the money
  • We just want to make good software

Feature Planning for 1.6

The following features were discussed for Camino 1.6 and given various priority ratings.

• P1: Scrolling Tabs
  • P1: UI
  • P1: Menu on side
  • P2: Animation
  • P?: "One past" tab selection
• P1: Software Update
• P2: Draggable Tabs
• P2: Breakpad
• P2: Extensions folder (global and user)
• P2: Undo close tab (reopen tab)
• P2: Firefox in user agent
• P3: Multiple tabs in home page
• P3: Search engine editor
• P3: Tabsposé
• P3: AppleScript support

Release Plan for 1.6

The following release plan was created for Camino 1.6. It should be noted that this is a tentative plan and is subject to change.

• Release date: End of August 2007
• 1.6 String Freeze: Beginning of August (3-4 weeks prior)
  • Will move freeze for P1s, maybe for P2s depending on progress
  • Will not move freeze for P3s
  • Need special queries for nib changes
  • Should we move string files to UTF-8?

Summer of Code Updates

Tabsposé: Some progress made; only a week or two in. Only shows a blank screen now (switches out views).

AppleScript: Should take less time than expected to write dictionary. Windows and tabs are about done now. Next up are bookmarks and history.