04.17.08

This ✈ has reached its cruising altitude

Posted in Camino at 11:32 pm by Smokey

If you’re reading this, it means we’ve survived yet another major release of Camino. Today we released Camino 1.6 (codenamed ✈) after about 10 months of development. Our fearless leader has already written about most of the major new features in the release, but you can also check out our freshly-updated Features page. It has been a long(er-than-expected) journey, but we’re proud of all the work and are pleased to offer you a new stable release.

The road to Camino 1.6 began in May 2007, when Mark Mentovai cut the CAMINO_1_5_BRANCH for Camino 1.5 security releases and the first fixes for 1.6 landed on the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH even as we finished work on Camino 1.5. Over the course of nearly a year thereafter, Camino contributors fixed nearly 400 “bugs” (problems or new features), and 18 different people contributed patches for this release (with Stuart Morgan leading at 153 fixes). Big thanks to the half of that list of patch contributors who aren’t regular Camino developers; every little (or big, like multiple accounts support for the Keychain) fix helps make Camino a better browser.

If you remember back to my Camino 1.5 wrap-up, the number of bugs fixed in Camino 1.6 is lower, but this was designed to be a smaller release. The fact that the number is not that much lower shows that Camino 1.6 ended up being a bigger release than you might otherwise expect from a 0.1 increase in version number (we played the late-stage version number “game” before, but we opted not to do it again). No matter which way you look at it, Camino 1.6 is another major accomplishment for our all-volunteer, all-free-time development team.

Thanks to the efforts of our fabulous localization teams, Camino 1.6 is available in 10 different localizations in addition to US English, with Spanish expected to join that list soon. Sadly, we had a few languages that shipped in Camino 1.5 disappear on us, so if your language is missing, please stop by the caminol10n mailing list and see how you can help bring these localizations back. (The work doesn’t require much specialized computer/software knowledge, and some of the existing localizers have volunteered to mentor new or revived localizations. Last year new contributors successfully revived the Norwegian localization, which was in Camino 0.8 but disappeared from Camino 1.0; you and a friend can bring Camino to thousands of users in your language!)

Again this year I went to bed last night while our fearless webmaster Samuel Sidler stayed up to put the finishing touches on the home page, the Features page, and dozens of other bits around the website. Aside from some afternoon connection issues, the website update felt like it went more smoothly than 1.0 or 1.5 did (I guess it helps when you’re not completely re-designing a site or adding tons of new support content ). Special thanks to Stuart for his last-minute debugging and testing during today’s release.

What’s next? Those of us who have been working on the website and other release details are going to take a rest for a while. Most of the development team, which had only a few things left for 1.6 after last month’s Beta 4, have been slowly ramping up to work on Camino 2.0. There’s not much visibly new over Camino 1.6 in the nightly builds yet (lots of Gecko changes, and Tabsposé is there but hidden), but there are some great new features already in progress that you should be seeing in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, enjoy Camino 1.6 and let us know what you think!

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