01.01.12

Camino 2011 in Review

Posted in Camino, Life at 3:03 am by Smokey

In many ways, 2011 mirrored 2010. For me, 2011 was even more exhausting than 2010, and that once again served to limit my contributions to Camino; for Camino itself, 2011 was again a year of transitions, as we continued to bid fond farewells to familiar faces and began to see the shape of things to come.

1. First and foremost, we finally shipped the long-awaited Camino 2.1, bringing a significant under-the-hood upgrade to all of our users, as well as a completely-rewritten autocomplete system for the location bar. The new version shipped in only six languages, but our hard-working localization teams are readying three more languages for Camino 2.1.1.
2. In addition to Camino 2.1, we released three security updates for Camino 2.0 and three milestones on the road to 2.1, for a total of seven releases shipped in 2011.
3. At the end of March, Mozilla announced the end of Gecko embedding, and as a result, we issued a blog post on the future of Camino.
4. We found ourselves very fortunate that there was no tinderbox excitement in 2011; the most exciting change in that area of the project was when I finally turned off Camino 2.0.x builds in December.
5. While there were no large website projects (or problems!) in 2011, we did do a significant update of the site content, both text and images, to coincide with the Camino 2.1 release. In addition, Samuel Sidler started a special project that he has yet to complete.
6. Once again the composition of our development team shifted as life and job changes impacted the free time of our all-volunteer team. In particular, this resulted in a virtual hiatus in the spring as many of these changes coincided. Thus, for most of 2011, only Stuart Morgan and I were actively working on Camino code—and not always regularly even then. Philippe Wittenbergh continued to help out with graphics and design, as well as QA and user support, where Chris Lawson pitched in as well. I enjoyed spending more time working on Camino code but sadly found myself stretched thin due to my older build and release, website and documentation, and support responsibilities.

Coming so close on the heels of Camino 2.1 and after such an exhausting year, this summary feels a little bit like it’s just a quick rehash of my Camino 2.1 release post—perhaps, for once, this annual post is an abbreviated one. Still, it provides an overview of the year’s major events in the world that surrounds our favorite web browser. As always, I want to thank the entire Camino community—developers, testers, localizers, users, and friends—for all of the help and support in 2011; Camino could not have made it this far without your contributions.

2012 is the year in which Camino turns 10, which is both exciting and bittersweet. I remain hopeful for the future over the coming year and look forward to diving back in to Camino work as the holidays wind down (and, in particular, shipping Camino 2.1.1 soon). If you want to help build the future of Camino, please do join our development discussion list—perhaps one of your New Year’s resolutions is to help develop your favorite browser? So here’s to 2012; together, let’s make it a great year for Camino!

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