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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."
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]
Camino is a good browser, but once khtml matures its likely to outperform the gecko engine.
For me the biggest difference is that safari still chokes on pages that the gecko engine will not but with the determination and skill of the Safari team this will not be the case for long.
Safari is my default browser since its beta, and my money is on them for the long term. However it is really nice to have options.
Pinkerton discusses the "why Camino instead of Firefox" issue:
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In Korea, long hair is for old people!
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
"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
.. to the 'difference between open and closed source models' ..
.. and Safari has the fastest startup time yet, so Safari it is .. but lets see if Camino is worth changing habits for..
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
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
The first commercial web browser, originally written for the platform the WWW was invented on, is still the best. OmniWeb has more features than any other browser.
I couldn't imagine using anything else, but if I had to use another browser, it would be FireFox. I don't care if my browser is integrated with Address Book. FireFox does almost everything OW does. Camino is stuck in a strange no-mans land, and with Safari out there, Camino will remain a nitch browser.
Safari is for average users. OmniWeb is for people that want amazing features. FireFox is for power users that want a free and open source browser. Camino just doesn't bring anything vital to the table.
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.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Well, he conveniently forgot to add that Firefox is easily extendible (extensions galore). It has way more options and functionality (some through extensions, but still...). It has a number of skins for people that feel the need to customize their browser. And It has some great features such as keyword searching, and the ability to search for text on a page without opening a search box.
Camino is playing catch-up with more than just Safari...
Don't get me wrong, I have tried Camino and I really do like it, but I use Firefox for the same reason that I use Vim: my experience is the same regardless of the operating system I use. Cross platform tools rock.
Camino has had tabbed browsing for a long time.
What he was talking about is the "tab" paradigm used by OmniWeb 5.0. This paradigm doesn't actually use tabs at all; rather, it's a drawer filled with thumbnails of the sites on it. You can typically fit four or five thumbnails into the drawer before needing to scroll.
Very pretty, but not nearly as useful in the real world; the thumbnails add less than you'd think and there's even less room for sites in the drawer than there is on a toolbar. I'm glad that Camino went with actual tabs.
But then I switched to Safari because I just loved pithHelmet, but Safari is prone to weird rendering errors and the timeout of 60 seconds is enough to drive one mad.
So atm, Im using Firefox with adblock. But Camino + adblock would be a dream setup.
Anyone know if it's possible?
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
This is the first actual explanation I've seen for a reason to select Camino over FF and it has me convinced to give it another try.
I started using Camino (Chimera, at the time) when I got sick of OmniWeb (version 0.5, maybe?) and switched from Camino to Firefox in order to see what all the hype was about. I've downloaded updates as they came out but haven't really given them much of a chance. I simply didn't see any reason to do so.
Finally, I've gotten them. Thanks for the quote.
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.
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.......
http://kmgerich.com/archive/000069.html
Not perfect but getting warmer.
Camino isn't meant to be Firefox, with an infinite, extensible toolkit for the power user. It's meant to be a lightweight OS X native browser that anyone can just open up and use.
The fact that Camino exists and a lot of people use it and like it doesn't mean that those who want / need the extra features of Firefox can't use them.
Unfortunately, even some basic features aren't available yet for Firefox on OS X. For instance, it's currently impossible to open a downloaded file because most of the application options are unavailable. And that's just the beginning.
So even some power users choose Camino as their Gecko browser for OS X. To each his own.
FWIW.
/. looks A LOT nicer on safari. camino, firefox, mozilla, etc. needs GOOD font smoothing on OS 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).
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
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.
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?
I use Safari and Firefox, because hey- there's shit Safari just fucks up on. Period.
:-| Hell, Safari has a ton of its own stupidities and neither Safari OR Firefox have a download manager that I like. :P
I think it's positively stupid that it's 2004 and there's no single Good Web Browser yet.
But now 0.8 and 0.8.1 have dropped, and I'm using Camino again - at least for the time being.
Hopefully development will remain steady.
I understand there are some obnoxious ads... but if you want free content, deal with the ads. I mean, blocking flash ads... popup blocking... understandable. But I have a lot of people who block my google text ad and my sponsor banner on my site... which keeps me from having a lot of money come out of my pocket each month.
Jay | http://oldos.org