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CaminoBrowser.org Launches
Samuel Sidler writes "Introducing CaminoBrowser.org, the new Camino project site. The pages have been completely revamped with up-to-date information, useful and easy-to-read support pages, and, of course, pretty pictures. Months of effort have gone into creating a truly excellent site. While the product pages will remain hosted at mozilla.org, our new website will be the home of the project and all support/development information as well as up-to-date news and information."
I would think Firefox would be Firefox for the Mac. It is very nice, though, primarily because it's a lot lighter on the usage of system resources.
Safari, especially the version that run on 10.2, is slow as a dead dog. Camino is fast, very fast, and positively blazing compared to Safari. Ya damn troll.
I wish they still called it Chimera. Camino reminds me of the rusted-out junk heap sitting on cinderblocks in my neighbors front yard.
That's one aspect of a web browser, there's dozens more. I kinda feel like tabs are the last real innovation for web browsers. Kinda like cup holders in cinemas. Guess I should be greatful it didn't take 30 years.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I recently stumbled upon Kazehakase, which uses GTK+ and is available for Linux. It's in many ways a superior Gecko browser for Linux to Firefox, mostly because it avoids the drawbacks of XUL. It has mouse gestures, full text search and thumbnailed history, RSS, better tabbing (drag and drop of them, they can be displayed vertically, etc.), and I believe some sort of benefit for Japanses speakers. Despite their limited development base, I really think Firefox's platform-specific alternatives (including Camino and K-Meleon) are superior to it.
Speed. Speed speed speed. Camino uses a small fraction of the resources that Firefox does.
For a mac, firefox just doesn't cut it. I really love the extensions but i'm willing to live without them to have the power of the wheel mouse and other such useful things. Camino uses a nice native cocoa interface which makes a big difference in usability.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
(IIRC) Camino has native widgets. Firefox uses custom ones.
There are 11 types of people in the world: those who can count in binary, and those who can't.
A new webpage is great but until the browser supports extentions its no good to me. browsing without adblock (amongst others) just doesnt feel like browsing anymore. why would one use camino over safari anyhow? exentions are the main reason i use firefox over safari; remove that from the equation and im not sure it would take much to make me swap
TIAEAE!
Camino has built in support for a lot of the system wide OS X features like Keychain, the spell checker, Address Book, most of the cocoa services, and probably a few others I'm forgetting.
OS X manages things like proxies and other network settings as part of the OS, so you can relatively easily (but not seamlessly, alas) switch from Ethernet to WLAN to modem connections just by selecting the configuration you're using from the Apple menu. Firefox doesn't pick up the proxy settings itself if you do this. Camino would.
Now, that said, Camino isn't compatable with Firefox's plug-ins, and I don't know about you but I've found it's gotten hard to browse without Adblock and Flashblock having tried them. (Hacks to add crippled functionality similar, but not really, to the two are usually quoted when I mention this, but the full blown "I want to be able to get a flash animation to start only when I click it" and "I want to be able to easily add wildcards to my ad blocking script" functionality just isn't present with these "answers.")
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I used Camino until they removed the sidebar feature. I would much rather have my most often used bookmarks on the side of my screen than the way Safari and Camino now do it.
There they were, sitting in the van with all those dials, and the cat was dead. -V. Marchetti, CIA
God knows the best part about any browser is how good it's website is! Woohoo!
Camino: :-(
+Nicer tabs
+Better scrolling
+Better integration
-No Mozilla extensions.
-So no way to block Flash or images natively
+Much better preference panel
+Pretty close functionality to Safari.
+Fastest of the three, it seems.
Firefox:
-A little glitchy at times
+Very good extensions support
+Works mostly the same as Firefox on other platforms
-Integration with OSX not so good, nor is it supposed to be.
-Slow at times.
Safari:
+Just works
-No way to block annoying Flash popups
Safari works for most things, Firefox works for the rest, and Camino sort of just ends up out there in case the first two don't work.
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
For everyone who thinks Camino is speedy versus Firefox and Safari, you should search the mozillazine forums for arch optimized nightlys of it... The closest comparation I can make is when the roadrunner goes "Beep-Beep" and leaves the coyote in the dust. :P
This browser is certainly the best choice if you have Panther on something like an iBook 500 with just about 400MB Ram. Safari tends to be slow, FF doesn't scroll well and is too heavy for my system (and doesn't feel right under OS X) So Camino does really do a nice job. And if you feel that 0.8.2 is too old, why not use a nightly. They work perfectly most of the time.
You imagine wrong. For one thing, dedicating part of the Firefox team to making a native OS X port would take resources away from Firefox. They are two different projects with different goals. Firefox is a multi-platform web browser. Camino is an OS X native web browser. In my case, I use Camino because it is far less likely than Firefox to crash my ancient 400 Mhz G4.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
Camino (then Chimera) was first released in January 2002. Firefox (then Phoenix) was first released in September 2002, and said this about the Mac:Not until Firebird 0.6 in May 2003 was the Mac was officially supported. If you're going to 'blame' a project for duplicating effort, don't blame Camino.
Also, an amusing aside: Dave Hyatt started both the Chimera and Phoenix projects. Now he works fulltime at Apple on Safari...
What does Camino offer that Firefox doesn't? The products seem to do much the same thing, and indeed, look virtually identical on the Mac. I guess my question is, why would somebody want to use Camino over Firefox?
MacOS X has two native API's - carbon and cocoa. Carbon hardly has any virtues of its own, it's main advantage is that its relatively easy to port old, non-Unix Mac applications to Carbon, so whenever anyone has any project that has its roots still in last century, he sticks with Carbon. This is not just the case of various Mozilla-derivative projects but also of - say - Microsoft Office for MacOS. Cocoa is the "native native" API and here's where MacOS X really shines. If you use MacOS X a lot, you tend to hate Carbon and favor Cocoa because Cocoa apps offer much better overall integration with systemwide services, such as your favorite spellchecker, they generally run faster and consume less resources. Camino is Cocoa, Firefox is Carbon.
Looking at the screenshots there's lots of improvements since I last saw it (0.7), but on the Mac side, Safari does everything I need.
My only problem with Safari is that it is so noticeably slower on HTTPS connections. I use a G4 at work, and any time I need to use an HTTPS connection I use Camino because Safari drags so much. It's not so noticeable at home where I have a 1.8GHz G5, but when on slower machines (including my mom's iBook), Safari just drags on secure connections.
Well 'Chimera' reminds ME of the lump on my back that was supposed to be my twin brother. Oh the humanity!
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails