(Hat tip to Chris Lawson.)

For the months of May and June, we’re running two different ads. Be sure to check them out.

As an aside: If you’re a designer who would like to help us design advertising, we have the option to change advertisements at any time and would be very appreciative of any help you offer. And, as always, we’re looking for designers to create graphics for our website. Contact me for more info.

Below is a graph which shows how many downloads we’ve had over the course of our releases.

The table above (for those of you who don’t wish to count) totals a little over 2.25 million downloads.

Notably missing is Camino 1.0. Sadly, when we shipped Camino 1.0, we weren’t yet in Bouncer (download.mozilla.org), which is the best way for a mozilla.org product to track their downloads. The estimates we received of Camino 1.0 downloads put them in the neighborhood of 350,000.

The numbers above also don’t include the, uh, “wonderful” download sites that link directly to a specific mirror instead of to our download.mozilla.org URLs, thus bypassing the mirror network. Over the course of time, we’ve had them correct links. Nevertheless, they mess them up every release. Counting in those downloads, we estimate an additional 300,000 1.0 and later downloads.

Finally, I’ve intentionally left out Camino 0.8.x both because it wasn’t in bouncer and because it’s so old. That said, some of our users are still on 0.8.x – mostly users who are on Mac OS X 10.1.

Taking all of those numbers above, in total, we’ve received approximately 2.9 million downloads of Camino 1.0 and later.

Sadly, the graph above also shows that most of those users aren’t upgrading, running older versions of Camino instead of the latest release. We’ve done some work on our start page to alert users when they’re running an old version of Camino, but people often change their start page. In Camino 1.6, we’ll have a software update mechanism built using the popular Sparkle framework. (Thanks to Stuart Morgan who wrote the Camino code to make this possible.) You can expect an alpha release of Camino 1.6 in the next week or two.

In terms of active users, we have fairly solid sources that tell us our user base is around (probably just below) 400,000 daily active users. Since we don’t have an update system yet (again: coming soon!), we can’t confirm those numbers, but they’re definitely a good estimate. Given an estimated 24 million Mac OS X users (Steve quoted 22 million in June; 19 million the August before), Camino market share would be around 1.6% of Mac users.

Check out Smokey Ardisson’s blog post for more on what various members of the Camino team have been doing.

Oh, and speaking of releases, expect Camino 1.5.4 this week.

One part of Mozilla’s evangelism team focuses on providing resources to the Mozilla community, including projects like Camino, Sunbird/Lightning, and SeaMonkey. (This is sometimes called the Community Giving and Empowerment Program.)

A little over a month ago, I approached the evangelism team and they’ve graciously provided a Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.5 for use as a Camino tinderbox. (The process actually went a lot faster than that, I’m just bad at blogging.) It’s still being set up, but soon you’ll see a new box reporting the build status of Camino on 10.5.

Thanks again to the evangelism team for providing this box and to the IT team for getting it installed in place for us!

The Camino Project is pleased to announce that we’re now accepting donations.

Up until now, when someone asked how they could contribute to the Camino Project, we directed them to our Contribute page our website. However, this leaves out those without time on their hands to participate in the development, quality assurance, or localizing of Camino. (Of course, everyone can promote Camino. Please do!)

Today, that’s changed.

Through the Mozilla Foundation, we’re now able to accept tax-deductible donations that will go toward the development and advancement of Camino. What’s more, through the end of the year the Mozilla Foundation will match 2 to 1 every dollar donated (up to $10,000). Donating now makes your dollar go three times as far as it normally would. You can read more about their new directed giving program from Frank Hecker’s blog post.

We want to thank the Mozilla Foundation for making this possible and thank any users who donate to Camino. Your contributions are greatly appreciated.

Those of you who were there can feel free to comment or make additions as necessary. Not everything is listed (hence the “abridged” version), nor does it need to be.

As always, everything on that page that looks toward the future is subject to change and, obviously, we didn’t meet some of the goals we intended to. If you have ideas on new features or improvements we should be making project wide, feel free to comment in the newsgroup with your ideas or comments.

(And yes, we know there’s a lot of spam in the newsgroup, sadly. The more you post, the less spam there will be! Percentage-wise, anyway.)

Last February (2006) was my first major Camino release (1.0). I honestly had no clue what I was doing. It was hard work. I stayed up all night a few nights before the release day and worked to finish the website. We issued an official press release courtesy the Mozilla Foundation, which helped generate some real press for this little project.

And, well, we just did everything again (well, minus the press release).

This time, I think it was much easier. Smokey spent a good chunk of time getting the documentation section ready for consumption and a good five hours putting his new docs into our design.

Jon Hicks (yes, that Jon Hicks… click folio26) started designing our website a few weeks ago and had almost everything ready for us. We had even started integrating some of the content back then and had a good start.

Looking at how much work there was to do, I knew that I’d be staying up all night to finish our website so we could release first thing in the morning. Initially, at our meeting last week, we decided to launch without the new site. But that just wouldn’t be very Mac-like of us, would it? Besides, no other Mac browsers would do something like that… (But honestly, that’s a pretty bold move on their part and it turned out successful.)

Just before midnight, it occurred to me that we we had a bunch of “placeholder” graphics, waiting to be filled. Now, I’m no designer. I can take screenshots and work to give them rounded corners, but beyond that, I’ve got nothing. Realizing that this wouldn’t be enough and knowing that our resident designer was far too busy to help this last minute (I emailed him a couple days prior), I did what anyone would do… I emailed for help. The one person I knew who used Camino and was another great designer, happened to be a friend of Jon.

This unnamed person (who I’d name if he gave me permission, but I haven’t asked) responded to my inquiry fairly quickly but, sadly, didn’t have time to help. However, he forwarded on my request to a bunch of other designers and, wouldn’t you know, a little while later, an email appears in my inbox.

Now here is where I have to pause and give mad props to the designer, Zach Inglis. Zach got the call for help just as he was heading to bed and decided to stay up anyway and help out. I kept him up ‘til almost 7am PDT, which was 9am where he was. And man, did he come through.

Without Zach, I’m honestly not sure we could have finished the site in time. The back up plan, to just modify the old site, would have been our only option.

I just want to publicly thank Zach for his hard work and dedication last night. It’s not just appreciated by me and the Camino team, but by the hundreds of thousands of visitors to our website each month. Thanks Zach!

More and more I’m realizing that this “open source” thing is really awesome. People are able to just jump in and help out, providing their talents to any projects that need them. The generosity of people, even at the last minute, astounds me.

To make this long story short, we finished the site in time, launched it and Camino 1.5 at about 8am PDT, and are now on our way forward, fixing the bugs I caused along the way. “Oh look, I broke all our promotion badges, yay!” (By the way, thanks for just catching that, Jeff.)

Oh yeah, we released Camino 1.5. Go download it. And check out our new website while you’re at it.

As if that wasn’t enough, I’m pleased to announce that, as of today, we have a second “Summer of Code” project, though not through Google. Peter Jaros will be working on improving AppleScript support in Camino. More information will follow on the wiki and elsewhere as it becomes available.

Also, for those of you who don’t know, Camino has this release coming up shortly. In the next week, you’ll be able to browse the web using Camino 1.5, our upcoming release.

I’d like to publicly thank Adam for featuring us on the OSNews beta site. We incredibly appreciate the exposure.

Om is a reporter who happens to love Camino and wanted to thank us for the work that we do on it. He’s written quite a few reviews about Camino, all of which (so far) have been positive. Really, we’re grateful to have someone like him who loves Camino so much and is willing to give us more exposure and help us grow.

We talked about Camino, life, where we are and where we’re headed. It was a great experience.

Additionally, Matt Mullenweg, of WordPress fame joined us about half way through. It was great meeting him as well and I’m sure I’ll see more of him. Hopefully he won’t punish me for still using Blogger instead of WordPress.