All of you Mac users out there probably know about Camino, the excellent open-source browser that is based on Gecko (Gecko, you may not know, is the same basic codebase that FireFox is based off of). You may even have heard that Camino 1.6 was released this week, after nearly a year of work on the 1.5 codebase. Some of the new features are as follows: Toolbar search (you can now add on searches using OpenSearch) improvements Find bar now is not a pop up dialog. It’s on the footer, where it should be. Safari still kicks Camino’s ass with it’s search highlighting, however.

Built-in software update via Sparkle framework. Better session saving Better Keychain support Leopard-specific UI fixes (retouched toolbar icons as well) Newest stable Gecko rendering engine. Camino would be my default browser of choice if it weren’t for a few nagging issues.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t use it almost all of the time, but little things keep me falling back to Safari. But the bottom line is that Camino is fastest browser on the Mac with a very low memory footprint. That means that it’s fast, and it doesn’t ever slow down your system over time.

The Safari folks can’t say either of those with a straight face, though they seem to want to claim it. Throw in excellent cookie management, built in flashblock and adblock, and throw in the excellent UI and wonderful Camino community, and you’re set. However, with all of that said, as long as some of the following nag the browser, I’ll be sticking with Safari 3.1 as my default: Buggy Flash: flash still doesn’t play nice with Camino all of the time. Sites that don’t crash any other browser have a tendency to crash Camino.

Camino needs draggable tabs, a la Adium, Safari, etc. This was supposed to be in 1.6, but has been pushed back to 2.0. .Mac sync. I want the same bookmarks at work, at home, everywhere.

All the time. Widget weirdness – this should be fixed in 2.0 when they switch to Gecko 2. If I can be picky, I’d love some developer tools type stuff: Activity monitor, DOM inspector, javascript debugger, source/css editing … but I’m not counting on it. Still, Camino is the fastest. lightest browser on the Mac as it is, and the issues I have are all trivial.

If you haven’t ever used it, you should give it a try. You’ll definitely be happy with your experience. Technorati Tags: applications, macintosh, reviews, software, camino, gecko, mozilla Leave a Reply Posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 4: 46 pm and filed under Apple, Reviews, Software, html.

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