Camino—the Gecko-based browser with a native Cocoa user interface—is considering switching its underlying rendering engine to WebKit. Developer Stuart Morgan announced the proposed change this week after Mozilla effectively put an end to the project that supported embedding Gecko into other software. While the team is still putting the finishing touches on a long overdue 2.1 update, which would finally bring rendering parity with Firefox 3.6, the small group is looking to recruit help to make the transition happen.

Camino is built by embedding the Gecko rendering engine—the same engine that powers Firefox—into a native Cocoa UI. In its heyday, many users preferred the speed and tighter Mac OS X integration that Camino offered over Firefox's XUL-based interface. As alternatives such as Safari, and later Chrome, became available, Camino's popularity fell. And, as improvements were made to the Gecko engine, the changes often broke embedding compatibility. Mozilla formed a team in 2008 to try and create a consistent embedding API that could alleviate these issues, but the team leader behind this effort announced on Monday that the embedding support would no longer be maintained. In particular, adapting Gecko to work in separate sandboxed processes made supporting the current embedding schemes impossible.

Camino began falling behind on adding support for emerging Web standards like HTML5 audio and video tags and Web fonts—a phenomenon that was largely attributed to the team spending time fixing issues with the Gecko embed. Version 2.0 was released in November 2009, which brought feature parity with Firefox 3.0—the only problem was that Firefox 3.0 had been released in June 2008.

Since then, Camino has gotten a few maintenance releases as the team worked to update it to use Gecko 1.9.2, the same version used in Firefox 3.6. While that would significantly improve standards support, Firefox 4.0 was released earlier this month with a number of improvements, including WebGL support and a significantly faster JavaScript engine. Camino won't be able to take advantage of any of these features.

The dev team expects to have Camino 2.1, with Gecko 1.9.2 support, released in May. And it will continue to maintain 2.1 with bug fixes and security patches for as long as Mozilla supports Gecko 1.9.2. But with embedding support gone, the team is uncertain of the browser's future.

The current plan is to look into ripping out Gecko and stuffing WebKit in its place. WebKit has robust embedding support built in, because Apple uses it to support Web-based views in Mail, iTunes, Mac App Store, and numerous other applications. This makes it easy for third-party developers to do that same; in fact, the GNOME project, one of the largest uses of Gecko outside of Mozilla, gradually dropped Gecko for WebKit because of its ease in integrating with other platform frameworks. Lead developers are currently in the process of recruiting new team members to begin planning the move to WebKit.

Given the move, however, it still remains unclear how Camino plans to differentiate itself from the other WebKit-based browsers already available. Indeed, WebKit-based Camino would be literally the same page rendering, just with a different user interface.

Morgan thinks this distinction is enough for Camino users. "If a WebKit-based browser with a Cocoa interface is the same as Safari, then Chrome, OmniWeb, iCab, Shiira, and others are all Safari too," he told Ars. "Of course they aren't; they all have their own UIs and feature sets, and the same is true of Camino. We regularly hear from people who tell us they've tried several browsers, and like Camino's UI the best."

We still get a small number of hits from Camino users here at Ars (Camino accounted for 0.08 percent of all visits to Ars in March 2011, compared to 0.25 percent in March 2009). Are there features that set Camino apart from the pack that would make a change to WebKit worth it to you? Let us know in the comments.