Mac Browser Camino 2 Gets A Release Candidate

When it was revealed that Mike Pinkerton, the lead developer for the Mozilla's Mac-based Camino web browser was moving over to Google to take charge of building Chrome for Mac, there was some concern that Camino would be neglected. Pinkerton assured development on Camino would continue, and sure enough it has. Today brings the first release candidate for Camino 2, the new version of the browser.

Camino, though much less prevalent than its Mozilla sibling, Firefox, has a solid following among Mac users who appreciate its speed. It has long been my browser of choice as it's relatively lightweight and very fast compared to Firefox. And compatibility with various sites seems better than Apple's own Safari.

We've been beta testing Camino 2 for several months now, and it's solid. It offers several improvements over the first iterations of Camino, notably in speed and the way it looks. Mozilla notes that this Release Candidate 1 could become the final, first official build of Camino 2 if there are no critical issue found.

So it looks like despite Pinkerton's Chrome time commitments, Camino 2 will beat Chrome for Mac even reaching beta status.

The anticipation for Chrome for Mac continues to build. Even Google co-founder Sergey Brin admits that he's disappointed with how long it has taken to develop. But, as we noted the other day, Chrome for Mac ? not Chromium, the open source browser on which Chrome is based ? looks like it's getting closer to a beta release.