Camino—the Gecko-based browser with a native Cocoa user interface—is considering switching its underlying rendering engine to WebKit. Developer Stuart Morgan announced the proposed change this week after Mozilla effectively put an end to the project that supported embedding Gecko into other software. While the team is still putting the finishing touches on a long overdue 2.1 update, which would finally bring rendering parity with Firefox 3.6, the small group is looking to recruit help to make the transition happen.
Camino is built by embedding the Gecko rendering engine—the same engine that powers Firefox—into a native Cocoa UI. In its heyday, many users preferred the speed and tighter Mac OS X integration that Camino offered over Firefox's XUL-based interface. As alternatives such as Safari, and later Chrome, became available, Camino's popularity fell. And, as improvements were made to the Gecko engine, the changes often broke embedding compatibility. Mozilla formed a team in 2008 to try and create a consistent embedding API that could alleviate these issues, but the team leader behind this effort announced on Monday that the embedding support would no longer be maintained. In particular, adapting Gecko to work in separate sandboxed processes made supporting the current embedding schemes impossible.
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