I've been reading a fair number of the little mini-reviews people have been posting, and the comments in response to them. In no particular order, some thoughts about various things I've seen:
- Session saving seems to be pretty popular with everyone, so I'm glad we got that for 1.1.
- People still think the Acid 2 test matters. I guess I was hoping it had died down and people had forgotten, but no such luck. The most disturbing was a comment someone made that “Safari is a more standards-compliant browser because it passes the Acid 2 test and Camino doesn't” Um... not so much. WebKit is getting better and better at compatibility, but when it comes to actually working with the most sites, WebKit most definitely does not beat Gecko. Large portions of the Acid 2 test are about obscure edge cases that may never appear on any site. The fact that jinglepants did a serious of very target fixes to make WebKit pass Acid 2 was cool, and apparently a huge publicity win, but it did not magically solve all of WebKit's other compatibility bugs. It's like all the hubbub that comes up periodically in the video-card world: it's nice that they can micro-optimize their cards to look good in the benchmarks that everyone uses, but what actually matters is whether or not the hot new games will actually run.
- Yes, we are not on the leading edge of browser features. There were a fair number of “Yawn, Browser X had that feature a year ago”. comments. You know what Browser X has for every value of X I saw in those comments? Paid, full-time developers. The fact that we are staying at least somewhat competetive despite having less that one full-time developer if you add all of us up and all of us being volunteer is, I think, pretty cool.
- Either most people didn't read all the release notes, or they all work for the government. The notes were organized by release, top down, so “New in 1.1b“, then ”New in 1.1a2”, etc. Many, many mini-reviews mentioned Kerberos support as one of the big new features they picked out of those lists—a feature that I think we only ever had requested twice (both by people with .gov email addresses), but was new in 1.1b. So unless there was massive hidden demand for it, its prominence in other people's versions of the feature list suggests a lot of people just never read past the first section.
- We don't have anti-phishing support. This is the one that bothers me, because we never said it, and it's not true. This appears to be people blowing the MySpace password-stealing fix out of proportion; if I have a page on a site you log in to, and I can steal your password without your knowledge, that's not phishing, and that's what we fixed. We'd like to have real anti-phishing as a feature, but we don't yet, and it's unfortunate that people will likely judge us as not having lived up to claims that we didn't actually make.
Of course, that's all smaller, random stuff. The overwhelming tone I saw is that people are happy with the way 1.1 is shaping up. Once we squash a few important bugs, we'll be ready to ship a 1.1 that a lot of people are really going to like.
Category: Camino
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