Camino is the discontinued Mac browser that used Mozilla’s Gecko engine and was formerly called Chimera. It was designed specifically for Mac OS X and combined Gecko’s rendering technology with a native Cocoa interface instead of Mozilla’s usual XUL-based interface.
The project began inside Netscape in late 2001, when Mike Pinkerton and Vidur Apparao explored embedding Gecko in a Cocoa application. Dave Hyatt then helped build Chimera, whose first downloadable version appeared on February 13, 2002. The name changed to Camino for legal reasons; “Camino” is Spanish for “path” or “road.”
Camino became known for fast loading and Mac-native features such as Aqua integration, Keychain password support, Bonjour bookmark discovery, pop-up blocking, and tab overviews. Mozilla’s later decision to drop Gecko embedding made future development difficult. The final release, Camino 2.1.2, arrived in March 2012, and the project officially ended in May 2013. It is often confused with OmniWeb, another historic Mac browser, but their origins and rendering technologies differ.