05.14.07
Tab scrolling lands, and other news
It’s been quiet on the Camino front for a few weeks; if you haven’t been lurking in the right places, you might think we’ve not been doing anything. In fact, we’ve been busy with a number of low-key tasks that are nonetheless important.
At the moment, we’re waiting on final word that the version of Gecko we’re using in 1.5 is “frozen” and stable before releasing, as well as continuing to test the release candidate builds. Our fantastic team of localizers are working on putting the final touches on their translations—in spite of a nasty, nasty bug in Apple’s localization software. We’re also working on updating the website for 1.5, with all sorts of updated documentation for the new features (this is where I’ve been spending much of my Camino time) and the other tasks that come with doing a major release.
While we wait on Gecko and while the localization and website teams are working on pre-release things, we’ve also been looking forward and looking back. Shortly after we release 1.5, we will also release the last security update for 1.0, Camino 1.0.5, as we sunset our support of Mac OS X 10.2.8. We’re landing a few additional fixes to make 1.0.5 the best version of Camino possible for our remaining 10.2.8 users (and we hope to see you again on Camino 1.6 this fall when Mac OS X 10.5 arrives 
).
Earlier this week build-master and tinderbox-wrangler extraordinaire mento (aka Mark Mentovai) set up new builds on our future build machine, the colorfully-named cb-xserve01 provided by Mozilla Corp, and did the branching work to allow us to both release security updates to 1.5 and develop Camino 1.6 off the stable Gecko on the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH. Since then, we’ve landed the first patches for Camino 1.6.
Which brings me back to the title of the post, tab scrolling. Many of you will remember that last summer, Desmond Elliott won a Summer of Code spot to improve tabbed browsing in Camino. His code for scrolling tabs actually landed on the trunk last fall, but “there be dragons” on the trunk, so Desmond’s work has been unseen by all but the hardiest Camino fans. I’m pleased to announce that, thanks to Ian “froodian” Leue’s Sunday afternoon wrangling of the original code and the changes we’ve made since then, scrolling tabs are now available for everyone in the Camino 1.6pre nightly builds. There are still a number of rough edges and things we want to improve—we know the scrolling animation really isn’t animated yet, and I hear things like some tabs are a pixel too long sometimes—but the less-venturesome among Camino users can now enjoy scrolling tabs for themselves.
Stay tuned for 1.5 and other exciting developments, and as always, enjoy Camino! 