Web Worker Daily

As noted by Download Squad, the alpha of the next version (2.0) of the Camino browser is out and downloadable here. Although it’s not anywhere near as popular a Mac browser as Safari is, it has its proponents. GigaOm’s Om Malik named version 1.5 as one of his top 10 Mac applications last year.

The alpha version is intended for limited testing and development at this point, not primary use, but here are some of the new things to expect as this version of Camino comes to fruition.

Camino is based on the Gecko rendering engine that Firefox is also based on, and not on Webkit, which Safari is based on. Download Squad notes some rumors that Camino would be switching to Webkit, but it’s not making that switch with version 2.0. Camino 2.0 will wrap in Gecko version 1.9, which has much more support for web standards than previous versions, and handles Flash better. Camino has always been noted for being lightweight and very fast at rendering.

There is a fairly extensive list of new features in Camino, viewable here. You can quickly see an overview of all tabs you have open, and-as you can do in Firefox–you can quickly go back to closed pages that you didn’t mean to close.  Version 2.0 is also adding full content zoom, which won’t just increase the text size on a page you’re viewing, but will zoom all content on a page.

There has been a flurry of updates to popular browsers in recent weeks. Opera is out in a new version, and updates to Firefox and Google Chrome are available too.