State of Camino

I just opened up yesterday's nightly build of Camino, and to my surprise, someone has redone the interface. Gone are the ugly blue buttons of 0.7. Blue is gone altogether, actually, as they appear to have moved on to lime green. The new buttons (and colors) appear to be inspired by Safari by way of Firefox, as the nav buttons are tiny, white rounded squares with small, dark-gray icons.

While this is an attractive look and fits into the Panther interface well (that goes for all three browsers), it's getting a little overused, I think. Safari has to use these icons to fit with the whole brushed-metal them, and Firefox is the Aqua alternative for this interface -- so where does that leave Camino?

I understand Camino wants to look as elegant as the other browsers, but I don't think that should mean creativity should get left out in the cold. I wish I had the skills to design a new set of buttons myself, but I have no idea how they implement these things or how to make them, plus my graphic design skills in general aren't that strong. I might create uglier buttons with the best of intentions.

But I won't complain too loudly if the buttons remain. Like I said, they do look nice, even if they're nothing to get excited about. However, I will be upset if they keep the current "tabs." When Apple decided to switch from tabs to elongated buttons in Panther, every program using Jaguar's tab widget got dragged along for the ride. The problem with that is that these programs weren't designed with Apple's button interface in mind. While Mac OS X's system preference panes look lovely, with a good margin around the rounded gray rectangle that encompasses everything that changes when you click a new button-tab, everything else looks crappy with just a dark gray arch above the content that goes nowhere.

Camino does have close widgets on the button-tabs now, a la Safari, which is a welcome change, but the buttons look out of place. Unless Camino widens its margins or ditches the widget, I will not be happy (if my opinion matters).