Camino hit 1.0 a few weeks ago. Oddly, I didn’t even bother to check it out.

I used to be an avid user and even contributed a few patches, my favorite being hand scrolling. That is, scrolling by dragging the mouse though the content area with command+option held down. It scrolls actual distance, sort of a laid-back alternative to the scroll wheel of death (which, honestly, gives me a headache).

It was a feature I had enjoyed on Mac Internet Explorer, so I spent some time figuring out the quarter-of-a-dozen frameworks you have to understand to program for Camino, and eventually got a patch checked in.

Later I was lured over to Firefox for find-as-you-type, and then Flashblock. The latter convinced me that Firefox, with its healthy extension ecosystem, couldn’t be beat.

I started working on patching the worst of Firefox’s Mac bugs, including one preventing users from selecting default applications for downloaded files. I checked in a good patch, then tried to get in approved by the Firefox inner circle.

The patch only affected Mac code, and it was terribly important. Ergo, the kids blew off my request for code review for several weeks straight. (Even the famous Blake Ross stepped in to dismiss it.) There was to be some special, future Mac “polish” release, and until then no Mac bug was worthy of their attention. I figured the “Mac polish release” would never happen. (It didn’t.)

In the face of the Firefox clique’s indifference to the Mac (and their general rudeness) I gave up on trying to help their project. Eventually some connected guy named Javier discovered that bug, and my patch, and he got it checked in just before FF 1.0. Whatever.

I stopped using any of Mozilla’s rickety browsers on Mac and just made Safari work for most things. So in February 2006 it seemed a little funny that Camino had finally made it up the hill to 1.0, but I didn’t think it would beat Safari.

Well I was wrong. Camino 1.0 is now the best browser for Mac. It starts up shockingly fast, much faster than Firefox on any platform, and even faster than Safari. Weird. And there’s this wonderful thing called CamiTools that lets you do all sorts of baaaad stuff, like install Flashblock, spoof the user agent, and ignore “autocomplete” for passwords. Sweet.

And what about my little hand scrolling feature? It’s still in there, though a little regressed. Now the cute little clinched fist reverts to an arrow as soon as you start to scroll. (That never would have slipped through under my watch.) So now I have to add setting up a Camino build environment to my to-do list.