03.25.08
Camino 1.6 Beta 3 now available
This afternoon, we released Camino 1.6 Beta 3. If you’re using Camino 1.6 Alpha 1 or newer, please let software update notify you of the new release or or choose Check for Updates… from the Camino menu. If you’re not using Camino (why not? 
), you can visit our preview site for more information. The automatic updates are now using Stuart’s new script, which allows us greater flexibility and which will facilitate a completely localized update experience for users of Camino 1.6 Multilingual.
There’s not a “by the numbers” this time around, but it feels like the release went pretty smoothly. So far (knock on wood). Sam was pretty busy all day with today’s Firefox 2.0.0.13 release, so most of the final “releasing” work was in my lap again. This is the third release I’ve pushed live (I think), so the work is starting to feel like a routine (Sam’s Release Checklist and the incremental improvements we’ve made to our website code and the process really help). It only took me about twenty minutes to make all the changes and another to five fix the various typos. Other than the bizarre issue where the Camino Blog post isn’t showing up on either Camino Planet or Planet Mozilla, it looks like the final releasing work went off without a hitch.
Since the period between Camino 1.6 Beta 2 and Beta 3 was a little extended, I had forgotten some of the great features that are new to anyone using Camino 1.6 Beta 2. Here are some of the highlights:
- Right after Beta 2, we landed Bryan Atwood’s patch that allows Camino to store and access login information for multiple accounts at the same site. That means Camino’s Keychain implementation, which predated the modern Keychain APIs, finally is all grown up. Thanks again to Bryan for all of his hard work on this feature.
- We now support passing feeds to certain web-based feed readers. Though I wrote about this feature in February, it wasn’t until Stuart’s patch that landed Monday that the feed handlers were automatically activated for everyone to use.
- There were dozens of user interface improvements and a couple of big web compatibility fixes, but the change you’ll notice most—or perhaps not notice at all, which is a bit by design—are the new icons for a number of our main toolbar items. They feature subtle polish to make them fit in much better on Mac OS X 10.5 while not looking completely out-of-place on 10.3 or 10.4 and maintaining the distinctive Camino look we all love. It wasn’t an easy task, but I think the new icons succeeded. As an added bonus, many of the icons that did not previously have specially tuned 24×24 pixel versions now do, so they look even sharper at small sizes.
As always, thanks to Mark Mentovai and Stuart Morgan for doing most of the dirty work related to today’s release, and I hope everyone enjoys Camino 1.6 Beta 3!
Edit: It turns out that the Planet problem, like every other problem I noticed this afternoon, was due to my inability to change all the required numbers correctly after copying and pasting. 