Your New Favorite Open-Source HTML, XHTML, CSS Compliant Browser Sucks

March 24, 2006 1:52 PM

Camino goes 1.0 As if us Mac users weren't smug enough, now we have a Mac OS only stable release browser built on Mozilla. Don't forget to install camitools. [via laughingsquid]
posted by MiltonRandKalman (49 comments total)

This happened a while ago. Anyway, the browser is quite nice. Shame it doesn't have an inline spell checker. I think that is the one thing I can't live without.
posted by chunking express at 1:54 PM on March 24, 2006

I'm not clear on this, after reading the links - what are the advantages of Camino over Firefox? I know it's designed for the Mac, but I'm just curious what the resulting advantages are.
posted by rush at 1:57 PM on March 24, 2006

but I'm just curious what the resulting advantages are.

Dude! It's designed for the MAC! Don't question it or Tom Cruise will sue your heresy-spouting ass.
posted by eyeballkid at 2:02 PM on March 24, 2006

From the Giga Om article and interview with the developer

OM: What are the main differences between Mozilla Firefox and Camino? MP: The core difference is in philosophy. We want to make the best Mac-native browser, not just one that happens to run on Mac as a port. The browser internals are very similar to those of Firefox (the Gecko rendering engine) but the front-end is pure Mac OS X native. We also support many Apple technologies that Firefox does not, including Address Book, Bonjour, Keychain, Spotlight, etc.

Also it's bloody fast. Yeah it lacks the extentions, but posting it around gets people interested, fosters a developer community.
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 2:02 PM on March 24, 2006

what are the advantages of Camino over Firefox

Less extension compatability, harder to get confused by keyboard shortcuts 'cause there aren't many.
posted by yerfatma at 2:07 PM on March 24, 2006

MiltonRandKalman: Also it's bloody fast. Yeah it lacks the extentions, but posting it around gets people interested, fosters a developer community.

Is that a good thing, though? One of the nice things about Firefox is that not only does it run on almost every platform, but the extensions are generally cross-platform as well. This provides a very complete browser on every platform it operates on, even ones that would normally not get as much attention, such as Linux. If the community gets fragmented into platform-specific browsers, then the less-used platforms will suffer.
posted by Mitrovarr at 2:10 PM on March 24, 2006

Huh. Mac fanatics vs. Firefox fanatics.

*grabs popcorn*
posted by eyeballkid at 2:14 PM on March 24, 2006

I'll make a note to order my MacBook Pro with the Religion Delete option.
posted by b1tr0t at 2:20 PM on March 24, 2006

Less extension compatability, harder to get confused by keyboard shortcuts 'cause there aren't many.


...Have you never used a Cocoa based app? They are totally crawling with standardised inbuit shortcuts. Which Firefox totally ignores. Firefox on OS X is totally unusable if you are used to using the standard Cocoa shortcuts.
posted by public at 2:21 PM on March 24, 2006

I am slightly drunk please ignore my inability to spell correctly
posted by public at 2:22 PM on March 24, 2006

Yerfatma didn't RTFM and exclaimed harder to get confused by keyboard shortcuts 'cause there aren't many.

I see shortcuts.

Mitrovarr wonders Is that a good thing, though?
Ask an Opera user. No seriously, I'm not under delusions this will replace or destroy Firefox. I'm still using Firefox, I need my Jacuba spell, bugmenot, greasemonkey, Google preview, I have 15 different engines in my seach bar, and so on... Camino is slick, runs great, crashes little and hopefully the developer has a plan to foster extention support or be able to port FF plug-ins to Camino. It's worth a try, don't like it, delete it.

Besides, I'm holding out for Flock beta
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 2:23 PM on March 24, 2006

Camino is a platform for ajax applications.

Safari is a web browser.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 2:26 PM on March 24, 2006

I might be interested if the Abe Vigota status extension is ported. Otherwise, blah.

Abe's still kicking, in case you're wondering.
posted by brundlefly at 2:30 PM on March 24, 2006

Can I assume it works like Firefox and not bother testing on it?
posted by Artw at 2:40 PM on March 24, 2006

Also: The features list is breathtakingly generic.
posted by Artw at 2:42 PM on March 24, 2006

I used Camino for quite a while but gave it up for Firefox eventually because it didn't handle other media well. I'll give this one another try.
posted by Turtles all the way down at 2:42 PM on March 24, 2006

I've used various 0.X releases of Camino (and Chimera before they were forced to change the name) for the past four years on my iBook, and I don't really see any big advantage over Firefox.

Its very nice in that it has all the native OS X UI elements and integrates more fully with the underlying OS, for instance Services which are not available under the previously mentioned browsers all work with Camino, but these have never been make or break issues for me.

As far as performance, I'd say, if anything, Camino is slower on my machine than the other browsers.

Not compelling to me.
posted by hwestiii at 2:47 PM on March 24, 2006

Meh, I prefer my El Camino.
posted by Smedleyman at 2:51 PM on March 24, 2006

Meh, I prefer my El Camino.

RANCHERO 4 EVAH
posted by hangashore at 2:55 PM on March 24, 2006

I'm using it now. Meh.
posted by Astro Zombie at 3:00 PM on March 24, 2006

If you don't know what advantages a Cocoa Mac application brings, don't bother with Camino. Firefox is just a port of a non-Mac application to OS X, and it behaves in non-Mac fashion.

As a big user of the advantages of Cocoa Mac applications, Camino is something that is interesting to me. But alas, it's not worth it. I like Safari better.

What are the advantages of a Cocoa Mac application? Spellcheck (which Camino stupidly omits), Text services, some pretty standardized keyboard shortcuts, UI consistencies, etc, etc., etc.

Camino is a Mac app. Firefox is an application that runs on a Mac. Safari beats them both for me.
posted by teece at 3:01 PM on March 24, 2006

If these folks come out with a MacOS native mail app, I hope they call it Scirocco
posted by MiltonRandKalman at 3:02 PM on March 24, 2006

it's not bad, thanks for the link
posted by matteo at 3:02 PM on March 24, 2006

Inline spelling and .mac bookmark syncing is what keeps me with Safari. I have Firefox around for the few interweb sites that do not play nicely with Safari. Maybe I'll give this a shot having downloaded most of the versions from .5 -- each time hoping inline spelling is included.
posted by birdherder at 3:03 PM on March 24, 2006

Why choose this over Safari? I'm asking seriously. No snark included!
posted by dobbs at 3:16 PM on March 24, 2006

Is that a good thing, though?

Huh? I support the Firefox project, but I also support the diversity and creativity and experimentation that the entire Mozilla project breeds. I use Firefox, but I have nothing against any browser on the planet, with a single notable exception.
posted by dhartung at 3:25 PM on March 24, 2006

It has the added benefit of looking more like IE7 than any other browser!

All hail the Hypnotoad!
posted by blue_beetle at 3:30 PM on March 24, 2006

If the community gets fragmented into platform-specific browsers, then the less-used platforms will suffer.

Does anyone else remember when Mozilla was explicitly denying that they were creating an end-user browser as opposed to an experimental platform for technologies that would be adapted to fit other operating systems?

For that matter, Safari is a Cocoa adaptation of KHTML.

I don't get this argument that diversity is a bad thing. I really don't. Gecko was built to be incorporated into a wide variety of end-user platforms.

dobbs: Why choose this over Safari? I'm asking seriously. No snark included!

Gecko appears to have better support for MathML and SVG. Some people prefer Gecko rendering over KHTML rendering. Some people claim that Gecko-based browsers are faster than Safari. Safari also has better adblock and

Personally, I'll probably keep Camino around as my secondary browser and play around with it. The spellcheck issue gets to me though.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:51 PM on March 24, 2006

And it's not as if Camino is a true fork. Camino is a browser that uses the Gecko engine in a Cocoa user interface. Firefox is a browser that uses Gecko in an XUL interface.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 4:00 PM on March 24, 2006

Well, the problem with a diversity of programs that do any given function is that often none of them get enough work, and they all end up sucking, or at least not being as good as they could be. Look at instant messaging, for instance; most of them don't work together, and the ones that do usually lack voice and video or even file transfer, stuff that could have been implemented 5 years ago if people had just worked together. I'm just a little worried that if the firefox project ends up forked for each OS it runs on, then only the wintel fork will be any good.

It's not as big a deal if it just uses Gecko, though, like you said, since that's not a real fork and shouldn't cause significant fragmentation.
posted by Mitrovarr at 4:17 PM on March 24, 2006

I like Camino. I go back and forth between it and Safari. And while I acknowledge the massive coolness of Firefox, somehow those non-native widgets make my eyes itch (I've seen a Firefox patch that gives it native-looking widgets that are somehow even worse).

What I'll say in Camino's favor is that it's less prone to getting bogged down than Safari. With Safari, you need to occasionally clear out your cache, your form-autofill entries, your favicons, hell, probably even your cookies.
posted by adamrice at 4:46 PM on March 24, 2006

Mitrovarr: Well, the problem with a diversity of programs that do any given function is that often none of them get enough work, and they all end up sucking, or at least not being as good as they could be. Look at instant messaging, for instance; most of them don't work together, and the ones that do usually lack voice and video or even file transfer, stuff that could have been implemented 5 years ago if people had just worked together. I'm just a little worried that if the firefox project ends up forked for each OS it runs on, then only the wintel fork will be any good.

Well, I think the primary problem with IM is that multiple key stakeholders have done a very good job at disrupting any attempt to get all of them to work together. But I think in most application domains that it's stupid to insist on one application that tries to be everything in a given domain. When you go that route, you get beasts like MSWord that are mediocre at everything.

And in addition, sometimes a platform-specific fork can be a good thing if it frees up developers to build stronger software without needing to worry about compatibility issues.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 5:05 PM on March 24, 2006

I'm just a little worried that if the firefox project ends up forked for each OS it runs on, then only the wintel fork will be any good.

Aaah, but, in general, the "Wintel" fork is functionally identical to the Mac and Linux versions. Firefox, it seems, is stable, is mature, and works on the big three platforms. It's done. Forks are just an added extra, nothing to be concerned about. And, although I haven't used, nay even touched a Mac since 1996, I can understand how Mac users might want a version of the browser in their native interface.

After all, the core, Gecko, is the same everywhere, from Netscape 7 through to Flock, and that's what renders your pages, and gives you the browser user experience. I don't know if I owuld even call changes to the surrounding interface a "fork", really.
posted by Jimbob at 5:15 PM on March 24, 2006

I want a browser that implements the BACK button correctly --
which is to say that it just goes back. It shouldn't re-layout the page, it shouldn't re-contact the site to make sure the page hasn't changed in the last 30 seconds, it shouldn't do anything except show me the bloody page I was just looking at.

I do not know of any browser that does this correctly. Does camino?
posted by nickp at 5:33 PM on March 24, 2006

I prefer FireFox. I can't live without certain FF extensions and I also find FireFox to be a lot faster than Camino.
posted by mike3k at 5:55 PM on March 24, 2006

As a casual user, I'll vouch for Camino. It at least seems faster. There's also a little feature next to Block Popups that lets you take off the ads... it even takes out Google Ads... very nice.
posted by bukharin at 6:31 PM on March 24, 2006

Ok maybe not Google Ads... but ad banners at least.. still worth it.
posted by bukharin at 6:34 PM on March 24, 2006

Opera is miles better as a browser than FireFox, only slightly better than Safari and not quite worth the non-mac-native UI.
posted by Space Coyote at 6:35 PM on March 24, 2006

nickp - Opera does what you demand, if you set the cache settings correctly.
posted by Jimbob at 7:11 PM on March 24, 2006

Camino is nothing more than a "look at what we can do" tech demo project. It allows some developers the freedom to demonstrate the plugability of the Gecko engine in a real-world scenario.

There's nothing wrong with having it around. I don't believe that it takes resources away from FireFox. It doesn't require special development tracks on other Moz projects to compensate for it, does it?

It's a very niche product to be sure, but if the devs are happy with what they're doing and they're giving the product away - what's the problem?

I run a TiBook at home, have an XP workstation at the office, and a few Linux machines in the home office. On each machine I use FF and the same extensions (Sage and del.icio.us) and everything works as I expect no matter what environment I'm in.

Some people will use it. Heck, some people use Safari (:shudder:)
posted by C.Batt at 7:13 PM on March 24, 2006

I use both Camino and Safari constantly, switching back and forth between them as my main browser every few days. I'm using Camino to make this comment now.

I also use two Japanese WebKit (Safari's Rendering Engine) based browsers pretty regularly: Shiira & SunriseBrowser

Shiira has Tabsposé and a bunch of really amazing keyboard shortcuts. Has all kinds of features I don't even know about.

SunriseBrowser has minimal UI: It doesn't have tabs, the titlebar and status bar are half-height, it defaults to having no buttons. What it does have makes it basically a Sticky-Note Browser: It's small and can have transparent windows.

I use browsers pretty heavily. If I just used one, It would crash every few days. So I rotate between primarily using Safari & Camino, occasionally using Shiira. That way I can quit one of them every few days, keeping the memory consumption down (All browsers swallow memory if you use them enough). At any one time I'll have two browsers open: one primary that I try to open new tabs and windows in, and a secondary that I'm trying to close tabs and windows in. When the secondary browser has nothing open in it, I'll restart it and switch to using it as my primary browser.

I use Firefox on OS X maybe once every few months, tops. Every time I try to use it It crashes under %10 of the workload that it takes to crash either Camino or Safari. It's quite the stinker on OS X.
posted by blasdelf at 7:21 PM on March 24, 2006

bladelf you have described my browser usage so well...now I can die in peace.
posted by filchyboy at 7:45 PM on March 24, 2006

One thing Camino could use work on is it's file downloader. It's file downloader window UI is vastly superior to Safari's, but is slower, both in terms of download speed and responsiveness.

Safari's is simplistic, but insanely fast. Faster than any other browser. Why? Because it's an interface to curl. I can scroll through a page in Safari option-clicking on links to files I want to download and Safari immediately starts seamlessly downloading them in sperate curl processes.

Because it's curl it can download many files at once, getting speeds that add up to 100 Megabits over a LAN without hitting the CPU any more than a local file transfer, and without slowing down Safari.
posted by blasdelf at 7:50 PM on March 24, 2006

Camino is stripped down ease, in my eyes. No, it doesn't have the extensions or speller checker, but it concentrates on doing a few things and doing them well and it supports some Apple specific services. I use Firefox sometimes, because of certain extensions, but otherwise it's Camino all the way baby!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:14 PM on March 24, 2006

Safari doesn't use curl. It uses Apple's own URL Loading API, which is part of its Cocoa framework. It is just about the fastest URL downloading library I've ever seen, but it's not nearly as comprehensive as curl. For example, it doesn't support SFTP, NTLM authentication, TELNET, TFTP, URL globbing, and about a million other little things curl does.
posted by boaz at 8:54 PM on March 24, 2006

I should also point out that in most cases, the 'speed' of a download library is going to be limited by either the user's bandwidth or the server's upload capability, not the available CPU. In fact, using the CPU as a measure is kind of misleading since drawing the various UI elements (especially the progress bar) associated with the download can often take more CPU than the actual downloading.
posted by boaz at 10:20 PM on March 24, 2006

Firefox on OS X is totally unusable if you are used to using the standard Cocoa shortcuts.

Which I'm apparently not (and apologies for offending the Masses); I didn't realize there were carved-in-stone Cocoa, not Mac, not Apple, shortcuts for browser applications. The tab shortcuts I'm used to come from Firefox and don't happen for me in Camino.

Perspective.
posted by yerfatma at 7:00 PM on March 25, 2006

Safari's Javascript isn't all that hot but is getting better in leaps and bounds. Also, I use the caption tag with tables a lot and Safari is terrible at them. Once you start to style captions with CSS you can see just how bad Safari is at them.

I reckon for most folks Safari is just dandy. I know my SO prefers it.
posted by bouncebounce at 1:01 AM on March 26, 2006

I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Omniweb is superior. It has built-in spell checking AND awesome tab management. And the kicker? It also has a session saver built in, so when it crashes (and all browsers eventually crash), you can start it back up right where you left off, usually...
posted by mhh5 at 10:56 PM on March 27, 2006