Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
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.
Oh, I should add that Safari isn't an option for anyone on 10.1, and isn't really that good of an option on 10.2 (slower, some major bugs that have been fixed in 10.3-only versions, etc., IIRC), which really helps make an argument for Camino on those older OS versions.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Pinkerton discusses the "why Camino instead of Firefox" issue:
p
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")
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
I currently utilize a cable modem and my experience has been that Safari is generally as fast, maybe a little faster in most instances. My comparison method was to delete all of my caches and see which browser brought the pages up faster. It also seems that I can drag images to my desktop a little easier/quicker with Safari.
Camino, on the other hand, handles saving a web page a WHOLE lot better than Safari - I frequently do not get any graphics with a Safari-saved webpage. Camino handles this flawlessly. Camino also has cookie/security controls that are more precise. So, if I have any concerns about security surrounding a website or when I am cruising around looking for eWomen, I use the old el Camino!
All in all, I think Camino is a very good browser and agree, as the article points out, that it is very benificial to the consumer that Safari has some very close competition.
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...
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.
Table rendering, especially for long lists, is MUCH faster on Camino. I usually use Safari for blogging, due to its built-in spell checking, but if I need to mess with MT-Blacklist and its gigantotable of denial rules, I switch back to Camino.
So for day to day browsing, Camino is my default.
At work I use Firefox, mainly for its Web development features.
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.......
That's a flawed method. The first time you request the page, it will probably be stored in your ISP's proxy cache, so when you try it with another browser, it will come from a cached copy even if you've cleared your browser cache.
Disabling proxies in your browser settings isn't enough as many ISPs institute interception proxies. For instance, virtually all cable modems I've come across have HTTP caches in them.
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?