Interview with Camino Developer Mike Pinkerton

An anonymous reader writes "As someone who has used Camino for much of the time since the OS X-centric Gecko browser was released, I've been hoping to see it hit version 1.0 (it's at 0.8 now). ArsTechnica has an interview with Mike Pinkerton, the lead developer for Camino in which he talks about the history and future of Camino along with his thoughts on Safari and Firefox."

Comments

Safari on Mac, Firefox on PC

[danigiri]

Mmmmm... the interview is interesting and I'll try Camino for a while to test the waters.

Any obvious advantages from day to day use? I see from their website it has some OSX-specific features that look cool enough, any highlights?

[Swimming in the calm waters of alternative browsers, Safari and Firefox when on Win]

Re:Safari on Mac, Firefox on PC

[the pickle]

I find Safari to be better on slow connections, but only because PithHelmet is so effective. Camino is typically faster (PB G4/800, 512 MB RAM) on anything better than a 56K dialup.

Both browsers have their rendering quirks, though both are Good Enough(tm) for government work. I prefer the interface of Camino overall, because I find it less visually jarring than the brushed-metal look of Safari (which, before anyone comments, looks downright *weird* in its Aqua "theme," with the brushed-metal look removed).

I still use Camino as my primary browser, though if there's something absolutely critical that I need to get to on a slow connection, I'll use Safari.

Also, Camino tends to play more nicely with sites that (stupidly) exclude browsers based on the user-agent string. Yes, you can change it in Safari, but Camino Just Works(tm) more often than not, and it's one less thing you have to mess with.

I can't really think of a good reason to recommend *against* either one, though. That says a lot for the current state of browsers on the Mac.

p

Competition is good

[HotButteredHampster]

Camino is a good browser, which I started using at 0.4. It seduced me with its beautiful anti-aliased text rendering when the only alternative was IE 5. There were big issues in the day: I never bookmarked anything, because bookmarks were as permanent as writing in sand. Below the tide line. Even so, I used it over IE (mmm... beautiful fonts) and the laughable Mozilla 1.0.

But I was seduced by Safari. It loaded quicker. It was faster. It was simple and elegant, which were things that Camino was going for, but wasn't there yet. I've used Safari ever since. Even as I did so, I was saddened, because I thought Camino would die because it was too late to the party.

However, because Camino leverages Gecko, and Mozilla/Firefox are starting to kick some butt, Camino has had forward momentum even when it was standing still. I use Firefox every day at work (right now, in fact), and it is to Windows what Camino can be to Mac. I've installed Firefox on my web server (the current version of Safari doesn't support OSX 10.2.8). As the interview points out, Firefox is good, but it's not a Macintosh app. Camino is.

There are now two excellent open-source HTML rendering engines which are actively being developed on the Mac platform, which is a much better position than it was when I was playing with Chimera 0.4. With the exit of IE, Apple still has a healthy competitive environment, thanks to projects like Firefox and Camino.

HBH

Veee-rry Smart answer ..

[torpor]

.. to the 'difference between open and closed source models' ..

open source == -0day!

I shall have to try Camino, but darnit, if it still takes forever to load and get itself started, its useless to me. web browsers need to open and close fast, on my system .. and Safari has the fastest startup time yet, so Safari it is .. but lets see if Camino is worth changing habits for..

Re:Veee-rry Smart answer ..

[BandwidthHog]

I keep one or more browser windows open on four of my eight desktops. Each of those browser windows has between one and ten tabs open. Unless something dreadful happens, my browser only launches after Software Update causes me to reboot.

Launch time is bandwidth-bound, so whichever one launches less wins. Unfortunately, Safari was crashing every month or two. FlamingCougar hasn't gone out once since I switched a few months ago *knock on space age composite*.

That was why I (somewhat reluctantly) switched, and extensions are why I'll never go back to Safari. Last time I used Camino (kept with it for about six months after Safari came out) it didn't support Mozilla or SmolderingChimp extensions. If that were to change some day, who knows?

Interesting quote on tabbed browsing

[chia_monkey]

Pinkerton was quoted as saying "For instance, we looked hard at the tabbed browsing style of OmniWeb even before they did it and decided that while it was very pretty and a great demo of Aqua, it wasn't all that usable on a day to day basis."

I have to admit that I'm a tabbed browsing junkie now. I go absolutely nuts if I have to use someone else's computer that doesn't have a tabbed browser. It seems like such an insignificant little feature, but it really does add a lot to my browsing experience. I'm really glad it's in there now, but I still found that quote to be quite interesting. It seems that if you want to be on the cutting edge, you'd want to put in the features and let the users decide on whether it's useful or not.

Re:KHTML vs. Gecko

[Brandybuck]

I talked to a few Mac users the other day. It turned out that they all used BOTH Camino and Safari, because there were sites Safari would render correctly that Camino would not. This may sound like shocking heresy to some, but this information comes straight from the users' mouths.

Until web developers start coding to realworld "LCD" standards, there will always be the need for multiple rendering engines.

Camino's biggest fault.

[Yaztromo]

FireFox is my day-to-day browser on OS X, and while there are some integration items I wish it had (like the integration with the Adress Book, the various Services like Grab, Mail, Speech, Summerize, and most importantly the Keychain), Camino has one major functionality lack which keeps me from running it -- no image blocking.

I can't understand why they haven't implemented this. It's in every other Gecko-based browser out there. I don't visit websites to see big flashing ads at the top and bottom of every page. I have better uses for my bandwidth.

FireFox has ad blocking. Camino doesn't. For this (and pretty much only this) reason, I'm not using Camino.

The day they implement ad blocking, I'll probably switch on my PowerBook.

Yaz.

Re:I heart Camino

[thirteenVA]

1) You're correct, it does however support using space and shift+space to quickly scroll.

2)I don't think safari or firefox does this either.

3)As far as i know, none of the major browsers do this (IE, Mozilla or Safari) 'right out of the box'. In safari you enable the debug menu, and mozilla/firefox require an extension.

Re:Firefox is the best

[Alcimedes]

One thing I'll say for Camino is they know how to render default buttons.

Firefox's button defaults look like ass. It has a lot of other, better features, but the UI isn't really one of them.

Now Adblock.......

Try this, perhaps

[BadMrMojo]

http://kmgerich.com/archive/000069.html

Not perfect but getting warmer.

Re:I used to use Camino

[OmniVector]

just add this userContent.css file to ~/Library/Application Support/Camino/chrome and you have *exactly* the same thing as adblock in firefox. you can even add this style sheet in safari (use the last toolbar button) and it's the same as pithhelment.

Camino + Japanese = still sucking

[bursch-X]

It still makes a complete visual mess when trying to display Japanese. It displays some words using different fonts for each character and quirks like this. Makes the page really ugly. I have no idea why that is, because Firefox renders those pages perfectly (as does Safari).

It's a shame because I'd rather use Camino than Firefox. Firefox doesn't use native widgets and still doesn't really look & feel like a fully OS X "native" application (although they're really doing their best to get closer).

Re:Camino + Japanese = still sucking

[Quobobo]

Interesting, what pages are you talking about in particular? I just fired it up and checked out a few sites (of course the all-important slashdot.jp), and I don't see any problems. Are you unable to fix this even by changing the text encoding? Only thing I noticed is that a few words in Japanese seem a bit blurry, but I don't know if that's a Japanese-specific bug or not.

Camino Localization project

[Anonymous Coward]

The Camino Localization project, aims to translate and release Camino in non english languages. If you want Camino to be available in your language please join the project.

Actually They're All Good ...

[Socket Scientist]

A few years ago when OS X was new and OmniWeb and IE were it, who would have believed we'd eventually have such an embarrassment of capable browsers on the Mac platform?