In place of an XUL-based user interface used by most Mozilla-based applications, Camino used Mac-native Cocoa APIs.

Mike Pinkerton had been the technical lead of the Camino project since Dave Hyatt moved to the Safari team at Apple Inc. in mid-2002.

In late 2001, Mike Pinkerton and Vidur Apparao started a project within Netscape to prove that Gecko could be embedded in a Cocoa application.

In early 2002 Dave Hyatt, one of the co-creators of Firefox (then called Phoenix), joined the team and built Chimera, a small, lightweight browser wrapper, around their work.

The early releases became popular due to their fast page-loading speeds (as compared with then-dominant Mac browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 5 or OmniGroup's OmniWeb, which then used the Cocoa text system as its rendering engine).

[citation needed] One of the first graphical web browsers was called Chimera,[7] and researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have also developed a complete hypermedia system of the same name.

[11] With the release of Camino 2.1 in 2011, the developers announced plans to transition to WebKit for future versions, as Mozilla had dropped support for Gecko embedding.