About Camino

• What is Camino?
• What is Mozilla?
• What’s the difference between Camino and Firefox?
• Can Camino coexist with Mozilla, SeaMonkey, and/or Firefox?
• What does “Camino” mean?

Installing Camino

• Where can I find out more about the latest Camino release and download it?
• How do I install Camino?
• How do I uninstall Camino?
• How do I upgrade Camino?

General Questions

• What is the difference between releases and nightlies?
• Is Camino available in my language?
• Where are my bookmarks, history, and other personal settings saved?
• Why doesn’t Camino have feature X?
• Does Camino support Firefox extensions?

Using Camino

• How do I import bookmarks from my other browser?
• How do I customize the toolbar?
• Where are my passwords saved?
• Does Camino support “form fill”?
• What is the keyboard shortcut for [some feature]?
• How do I create a tab group?
• Does Camino have an ad-blocker?
• Does Camino support “session saving” or remember what pages were open if Camino quits unexpectedly?
• Does Camino support RSS or Atom feeds?
• Does Camino support the Mac OS X spell-checker?
• Can Camino make the browser window take up the entire screen?

Troubleshooting

• Various characters aren’t displayed correctly (such as the € and £ signs). How do I make them display properly?
• When I click on a “mailto” link, Camino claims “mailto is not a registered protocol.” What’s wrong?
• My language isn’t supported by the Mac OS X spell-checker; how do I check my spelling?
• I read and write in several languages; how do I switch which language is used by the spell-checker?
• I accidentally added a word to the dictionary; how do I make the dictionary forget the word?
• How do I disable spell-checking?
• I speak Norwegian and use Mac OS X 10.3.9; how do I make sure pages display in Norwegian first?
• What is Talkback, and why does it appear after Camino crashes?

About Camino

Q. What is Camino?
A. Camino is a free, open-source web browser for Mac OS X. It uses Apple’s Cocoa programming toolkit and the Gecko web page rendering engine from Mozilla. Camino is small, fast, and easy-to-use, and offers many advantages over other browsers, such as the ability to block pop-up windows and annoying advertising. Read more about the browser on the Features page or on our Project home page.

Q. What is Mozilla?
A. Mozilla is an open-source project and toolkit, designed for standards compliance, performance, and portability and dedicated to preserving choice and innovation on the Internet. The Mozilla Foundation supports the development and testing of Camino, Firefox, and other products by providing discussion forums, software engineering tools, releases, and bug-tracking tools. For more about mozilla.org, read About Mozilla.

Q. What’s the difference between Camino and Firefox?
A. Camino is a native Mac OS X application; this means it will only work on the Mac platform. Firefox, however, comes in all kinds and flavors and works on several operating systems. Camino combines the Mac user experience — famous for its consistent visual and behavioral experience across applications and the operating system — with the Gecko rendering engine — built and tested by thousands of volunteers, incorporating the absolute cutting edge in web innovations. Camino uses the Mac OS X Aqua interface and uses APIs and services only available to applications native to Mac OS X. Some of these services include the Address Book, Keychain, and Bonjour (Rendezvous). Though Firefox looks like it is using the same Aqua interface, it actually fakes it, and Firefox focuses on cross-platform consistency rather than integration with Mac OS X technologies.

Q. Can Camino coexist with Mozilla, SeaMonkey and/or Firefox?
A. Yes. Camino, Firefox, and SeaMonkey use different profiles that don’t interfere with each other.

Q. What does “Camino” mean?
A. “Camino” is Spanish, as in “el Camino”. It means “way” or “path” and is an extension of the “Navigator” idea from which this project originally sprang.

Installing Camino

Q. Where can I find out more about the latest Camino release and download it?
A. For more information about the latest official release of Camino, including a download link, see the release notes.

Q. How do I install Camino?
A. To install Camino you simply drag the Camino application icon from the disk image to your Applications folder.

Q. How do I uninstall Camino?
A. Simply drag the Camino icon to the Trash and empty the Trash. Optionally, remove the profile folder (in your home directory ~/Library/Application Support/Camino), which contains all your bookmarks and settings.

Q. How do I upgrade Camino?
A. Camino supports automatic updates. By default, Camino will notify you of a new release once it is available. You can also check for new releases manually by selecting Check for Updates… from the Camino menu. Click Install Update in the Software Update window, and Camino will download and install the new version for you. Your existing bookmarks, history, and settings will not be affected by the upgrade.

General Questions

Q. What is the difference between releases and nightlies?
A. Releases are stable, well-tested versions of Camino that should be downloaded by the first-time user. Nightly builds are released every day and contain the very latest changes, including new features and new bugs. Don’t expect everything to work in the nightly builds.

Q. Is Camino available in my language?
A. Possibly. Since Camino is an open-source project, contributors are constantly translating Camino into other languages. You can check to see if Camino is available in your language on the Releases page. If Camino is not available in your language and you would like to translate it, visit the official Camino Localization Project for more information. Make sure you check the list of active contributors first so you don’t end up doing duplicate work. You can also look at the broader list of contributors who have registered with the Camino Localization Project and who are probably looking for teammates to help complete a translation.

Q. Where are my bookmarks, history, and other personal information saved?
A. Camino stores your personal settings — such as the bookmarks, preferences, and cookies — in your profile folder (in your home folder ~/Libary/Application Support/Camino). Saved passwords are stored in the Mac OS X Keychain.

Q. Why doesn’t Camino have feature X?
A. Camino is a product that is under constant development and there are still features we plan on adding in future releases. Having said that, we intend to keep Camino as simple and easy to use as possible, so we are reluctant to add lots of new features. If there is a feature that you think really should be included, send us feedback.

Q. Does Camino support Firefox extensions?
A. No, and it never will. Firefox extensions rely on XUL (a user interface toolkit made by Mozilla) to interact with the user and draw their interface. Camino uses Cocoa (an interface toolkit made by Apple) and does not support XUL.

Customizing Camino

Q. How do I import bookmarks from my other browser?
A. See our Documentation for information about how to work with bookmarks in Camino.

Q. How do I customize the toolbar?
A. See our Documentation for information about customizing Camino’s toolbar.

Q. Where are my passwords saved?
A. Camino saves passwords in the Mac OS X Keychain, and it can read web page passwords saved in the Keychain by other applications, like Safari. All of the passwords that are added to the Keychain can be accessed and edited using Keychain Access, which is located in the Utilities folder inside the Applications folder.

Q. Does Camino support “form fill”?
A. Camino can fill in certain non-password forms using information stored in the “Me” card in Address Book. To have Camino fill out a form using this information, choose Fill Form from the Edit menu or add the Fill Form button to your toolbar. Camino can also auto-fill login and password forms using information saved in the Keychain.

Q. What is the keyboard shortcut for [some feature]?
A. See our Keyboard Shortcuts page for a full list of supported shortcuts.

Q. How do I create a tab group?
A. See our Documentation for information about working with tabs in Camino.

Q. Does Camino have an ad-blocker?
A. Yes! Camino includes an ad-blocker that blocks ads on most pages. You can enable it in the Web Features preference pane. If you see an ad get through, feel free to file a bug to help improve our ad-blocker.

Q. Does Camino support “session saving” or remember what pages were open if Camino quits unexpectedly?
A. Yes! Camino automatically keeps track of pages that are open in case it quits unexpectedly, and the next time you launch Camino, you will have the option of restoring the pages that were open before the unexpected quit.

You can also configure Camino to restore the pages you were viewing when you chose to quit Camino; in the General preference pane, simply check the box for Load the pages that were open before quitting.

Q. Does Camino support RSS or Atom feeds?
A. If a page you are viewing offers an Atom or RSS feed, Camino will detect the feed and notify you by displaying the feed icon at the right edge of the location bar. By clicking on the feed icon, you can subscribe to the feed in your prefered feed-reading application (including certain web-based feed readers).

Q. Does Camino support the Mac OS X spell-checker?
A. Yes, Camino uses the same Mac OS X spell-checker as Mail, TextEdit, and Keynote to check spelling in web page text fields. When the spell-checker finds a misspelled word, Camino will display a dotted underline underneath the word. Ctrl-click on the word and choose the correct spelling from the context menu, or tell the spell-checker to learn or ignore the word.

Q. Can Camino make the browser window take up the entire screen?
A. In older versions of Camino, clicking on the zoom button (“green ball”) in the window titlebar or using the Zoom command in the Window menu would make the browser window take up the entire size of your screen. Recent versions of Camino, like well-behaved Mac applications, now resize the browser window to the size that best fits the content of the window when using the zoom button or menu command. To access the old behavior, hold down the ⇧ key when using the zoom button or menu command.

Troubleshooting

Q. Various characters aren’t displayed correctly (such as the € and £ signs). How do I make them display properly?
A. Certain web pages do not specify their encoding, so Camino must guess the encoding and does not guess always correctly. To make the page display properly, simply specify the encoding used on the page by going to Text Encoding submenu of the View menu.

Q. When I click on a “mailto” link, Camino claims “mailto is not a registered protocol.” What’s wrong?
A. This message is due to an error in the way Apple’s LaunchServices communicates with Camino. If you use Eudora as your mail client, the simple solution is to open Eudora by double-clicking on your “In” mailbox file and then clicking “OK” in the “This will open the application ‘Eudora’ for the first time” dialog. If you use another mail client, the following steps should resolve the situation:

1. Quit both Camino and your mail client.
2. Open Mail and set it to be your default mail client (from the Mail application menu, choose Preferences… and then click on the General toolbar icon; in the drop-down menu next to Default Email Reader:, select Mail). Then quit Mail.
3. Open Camino and click a “mailto” link; after Mail launches, quit Camino.
4. In Mail, change the default mail client back to your preferred email application and then quit Mail.
5. Open Safari and click a “mailto” link; you should see the “This will open the application ‘Name of Mail Client’ for the first time” dialog. Click “OK” in the dialog and your mail client should launch; then quit both Safari and your mail client.
6. Open Camino and click a “mailto” link; your mail client should now launch as expected.

Q. My language isn’t supported by the Mac OS X spell-checker; how do I check my spelling?
A. The Mac OS X spell-checker is extensible, so there are many third-party spell-checker modules and dictionaries available to support other languages. If you have installed one of these dictionaries, Camino will use it just like other applications on your Mac. The following are some of the third-party dictionaries and the languages they support:

• CheckSpell adds Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak, and Ukrainian to the Mac OS X spell-checker. (Note that CheckSpell is incompatible with, and will remove, cocoAspell.)
• cocoAspell supports 74 languages.
• Hebrew Spelling Service plugs Hspell into the Mac OS X spell-checker.
• MySpellX adds Hungarian to the spell-checker.
• Soikko Mac OS X:lle adds support for Finnish to the Mac OS X spell-checker.
• Stafsetning adds support for Icelandic to the Mac OS X spell-checker.

Q. I read and write in several languages; how do I switch which language is used by the spell-checker?
A. On Mac OS X 10.5, Ctrl-click in any web page text field and select the appropriate language from the Spelling Language sub-menu.

On Mac OS X 10.3.9 and 10.4, because of limitations of supporting code that Camino cannot change, a somewhat-complex series of steps is required to switch which dictionary the Mac OS X spell-checker uses to check text in Camino. In many cases, however, the system will choose the correct dictionary automatically. If it does not, follow these steps:

1. Type a word in the search field in the toolbar.
2. Ctrl-click on the word.
3. In the context menu, open the Spelling sub-menu and choose the Spelling… item.
4. In the Spelling panel that appears, select the appropriate dictionary from the pop-up menu and close the panel.

If the languages you use are among the languages supported in the Mac OS X spell-checker by default, you might consider selecting the “Multilingual” dictionary, which will check spelling using all of the default dictionaries.

Q. I accidentally added a word to the dictionary; how do I make the dictionary forget the word?
A. The Mac OS X spell-checker allows you to make the dictionary forget a word using the Spelling panel. Because of limitations of supporting code that Camino cannot change, a somewhat-complex series of steps is required to open the Spelling panel to forget a word from within Camino.

1. Type the word you want to forget in the search field in the toolbar.
2. Ctrl-click on the word.
3. In the context menu, open the Spelling sub-menu and choose the Spelling… item.
4. If the word you want to forget does not appear in the text field in the Spelling panel, type the word. Then press the Forget button to forget the word. Now close the Spelling panel.

On Mac OS X 10.5, simply choose the Unlearn Spelling item from the context menu at step 3.

Q. How do I disable spell-checking?
A. If you wish to disable spell-checking in Camino in a specific web page text field, Ctrl-click in that field and select the Check Spelling While Typing from the menu; this will remove the check mark next to that item and disable spell-checking.

If you wish to disable spell-checking for all web pages, see our documentation for hidden preferences.

Q. I speak Norwegian and use Mac OS X 10.3.9; how do I make sure pages display in Norwegian first?
A. Due to a bug in Mac OS X 10.3.x, Norwegian users of Camino will need to manually set their “accept-language” string manually in all cases. See the Setup documentation for complete instructions. (Apple fixed this bug in Mac OS X 10.4, so no work-arounds are necessary when using that version of Mac OS X.)

Q. What is Talkback, and why does it appear after Camino crashes?
A. If you are using a PowerPC-based Macintosh and Camino crashes, you’ll see a program called Talkback appear, asking you to send information about the crash. Asa Dotzler of mozilla.org has written a good explanation of what Talkback is:

Talkback is a client application and server (plus server infrastructure and development/administration people) contributed to mozilla.org by Netscape [in the 1990s]. mozilla.org, many years ago, agreed to make an exception and include this product with our binary nightly and milestone distributions even though it’s not open source because it provides huge value in debugging and isolating stability issues. Talkback has been used to identify and debug thousands of major crash bugs in Mozilla over the years and we’re very happy to be able to include it in the Firefox [and Camino] testing builds.

How it works: A Talkback binary is packaged up with the Camino browser binary. When the browser crashes, the Talkback application is triggered and it offers the user the option to participate. If a user says no then nothing happens. If a user agrees to help the Mozilla effort by submitting crash data then she is prompted with optional fields for including her e-mail address, the URL that triggered the crash, and a comment. That user-entered data along with a stacktrace of the crash is sent to a Talkback server at mozilla.org which is accessible to many of the Mozilla developers. In aggregate, all of the crash data can very quickly point out specific problems being encountered by large groups of users. A small team of engineers pour through these aggregate reports and turn them into bugzilla bugs with good debug information which leads to quick fixing of the most high-profile stability problems. To see some of these bugs, query Bugzilla for the keywords topcrash and topcrash+.

What else: Talkback is not spyware, adware or anything of the like. Users are clearly prompted and asked to submit the report. User data unrelated to the Mozilla crash isn’t at all useful to us. We only care about making Mozilla more stable. If you don’t want to help Mozilla, Firefox, and Camino become more stable by submitting your crash reports then don’t. No data is being sent without your explicit consent. I’d encourage anyone that wants to see this browser improve to submit those reports. They are very, very helpful. But, like I said, if you don’t want to, then don’t. Just remember that we can’t fix the bugs we can’t identify. If you’re happy seeing the same crash over and over then don’t worry about sending in that report.