This caught me a bit off guard and it must have been the time of the month as well as I “got a bit emotional” over what is really just a web browser (but it’s not!).

The benefit of me not finding time to write this straight away is that I can start this next sentence as follows: At first I wasn’t sure how I felt about the future as although I love Camino and have been using it for a long time, if it wasn’t Gecko based how would it differentiate itself?

But then I remembered: It’s not Gecko I love. I’m actually a big I’m a big fan of Webkit (although I sincerely hope Gecko remains a strong competitor just for the benefit that competition provides; if only Mozilla had decided to make embedding easier rather than drop support!) and there was a time I went all Webkit fanboi-ish and was using the nightlies until I realised that the rendering engine really doesn’t matter that much (not between Gecko, Webkit and Presto at least) if the UI of the browser is rubbish. And I HATED Safari’s UI (still do). When I realised that, I spent some time looking at Webkit alternatives (iCab, Shiira, Omniweb), but non fitted the bill so I went back to Camino and was happy.

There is a niggle in my mind that since Camino-Webkit will be Intel only, that if I had an Intel Mac would I just use Chrome, like I do on Windows? I really like the Chrome UI. But since I still don’t have an Intel Mac I can’t really say for sure; does it have the same level of system integration as Camino? Growl Support? Applescript? Keychain? Would Chrome be a massive resource hog? How do start-up times compare?

A Webkit based Camino is actually an exciting thought. Getting ahead of myself (and the developers!), but once ported across it would surely free up the very limited time of the developers that was mostly spent tackling Gecko integration, to focus on other areas: UI evolution, perhaps even extensions and greasekit support, and any other wonderful ideas they’ve had up their sleeves for years, but have not had the resource to work on.

I just wish I had my own Mac again so I could get involved and help out.