I gave it a try, and now I’m switched over. Camino is a Mac browser that’s based on the Mozilla Gecko engine, but doesn’t use the Firefox XUL front-end. Previously, I used Camino 1.0 as my main everyday browser because it was the only one that felt like it belonged on the Mac, was acceptably fast, and didn’t periodically balloon out of control. (Yes, I use Firefox too for its developer tools.) The 1.1 beta has fixes for pretty well all the things that irritated me about 1.0: it saves your tabs in case you crash, text-edit controls now support the control-F/B/N/P/A/E idiom just like everything else, and resize-to-fit works properly. I think that for almost any Mac user who spends a lot of time in the browser, Camino would be worth a serious look.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: J$ (Feb 26 2007, at 16:47)
If only there was compatibility for the plugins. Can't live without my Adblock Plus.
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From: Bill Mill (Feb 26 2007, at 17:00)
I miss ad-blocking, flashblocking, bugmenot, downthemall, and the web developer toolbar when I leave firefox.
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From: stephen o'grady (Feb 26 2007, at 17:05)
interesting. alex king just switched in the other direction:
http://alexking.org/blog/2007/02/12/switching-to-firefox
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From: wka (Feb 26 2007, at 18:15)
Ad blocking and Flash blocking are available for Camino via addons like CamiTools
http://www.nadamac.de/camitools/
I use Firefox with FlashBlock and AdBlock (+Filterset.G) at work, and Camino with CamiTools' blocking at home, and I see only a minimal difference in what is blocked in FF vs. Camino (AdBlock in FF blocks a few more ads here and there).
Note that the CamiTools page says it is only to be used with Camino 1.0.x. I am using it with the beta (it was still installed after I upgraded Camino), and it seems to be working fine. Your mileage, of course, may vary.
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From: Lee (Feb 26 2007, at 19:30)
I'm going to try it first chance I get. I've been waiting for spell check in text areas, which, from a little googling, appears to be included in this release. Correct?
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From: Leslie (Feb 26 2007, at 22:31)
The only thing that sucks about Camino is the icon.
I replaced it with the appicon from the "Hicks Camino" theme, available here: http://www.haque.net/software/camino-g4/Camino.html
~L
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From: Zef Hemel (Feb 27 2007, at 01:22)
I switched a month or so ago, but have since switched back to Firefox. The reason being that tabs sometimes didn't reload properly. A refresh would show exactly the same page even though it actually had changed. Sometimes when you typed in a new address the old page just kept showing, the only solution was to close the tab and create a new one. There were more annoying little things like that, that made switch back to the (annoyingly slow) Firefox.
That's why I decided to wait for a final version first.
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From: Smokey Ardisson (Feb 27 2007, at 01:26)
Camino has included ad-blocking since before 1.0, and the new beta includes Flashblock; no need for any third-party add-ons.
Tim mentioned what he liked about the beta, but the website for the beta and the release notes (for the beta and the previous alphas) mention a host of other changes over 1.0.x: http://beta.caminobrowser.org
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From: J (Feb 27 2007, at 07:32)
As a long time Opera-on-Windows user who's recently got a Mac, I'm reasonably impressed by the Mac version of Opera. It does what I expect, but feels very Mac-like.
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From: Zach (Feb 27 2007, at 09:56)
Also worth a look for any serious mac user is OmniWeb. For a while it lacked the speed of camino or firefox, but that has long since been fixed. Features it has that I still haven't seen in other browsers:
The tab bar (seems to be a polarizing feature, but I love it.)
Workspaces (can be used simply to save state, but also to save muiltiple states)
Expanded textarea fields (Open a <textarea> in a seperate, resizable window. Useful for sites that expect you to type a message into a tiny 20x3 window.)
It also behaves more like a mac application than any other browser, including safari. Honestly, I've gotten so spoiled that when I'm on a mac I can't use any other browser.
(I'm not affiliated with OmniGroup, just a happy long-time user.)
Meta-comment: Why doesn't the comment entry remember my name and URL? It'd sure be nice if it did.
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From: fyreflye (Feb 27 2007, at 15:54)
I just started using Camino 1.1b today. For Adblock fans (and I'm one too) there's a check box in Preferences -> Web Features to block advertising and another to block pop ups. So far it seems to work as well as Adblock. The spell checker works too. I'm thinking of switching.
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From: Robert Sayre (Feb 27 2007, at 23:31)
http://www.mozilla.org/about/
"The mission of the Mozilla project is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet."
Firefox and Gecko need some market share to do that, but they don't need to be dominant. If users have a choice between Firefox and Camino and Safari and OmniWeb and IE and Opera and a bunch of other things, that's great. When 99.9% of the world is using one browser, that's not healthy.
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From: Eddie (Mar 01 2007, at 02:05)
Hi, I was wondering if anyone else has noticed that when using Firefox extensively on Mac OS X (10.4.8), that it sometimes causes white rectangles to be retained on the screen (even after Firefox is hidden and no longer appears in the foreground)? This becomes very annoying after a while and to me is another reason to switch to Camino if the same artifacts do not appear with similar heavy use?
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