Open)Justin Williams reviews the latest version of Camino: a Web browser that features the same engine behind Firefox, but with a touch of Mac class.
In the early days of Mac OS X, there was a single browser on the market: Internet Explorer 5.5. IE:mac was a direct port of the classic version of the browser to a native Mac OS X application, and didn't offer many bells and whistles that more recent browsers featured. The sad fact was that IE:mac and the Mac browser market was behind the times in those early days. Salvation came in late 2001 when a group of Netscape employees set out to prove that they could embed their Gecko rendering engine into a Cocoa application.
The result of their work was released as Chimera and quickly gained ground on IE:mac thanks to it's faster page loading, better rendering of more modern Web pages and it's support for, at the time, a killer feature known as tabbed browsing. While the Chimera name was retired due to some legal conflicts, the browser the band of Netscape employees set out to build still exists today as Camino.
The Camino project is an open source Mac OS X based Web browser that features the same browser rendering engine, Gecko, used in Mozilla's popular Firefox Web browser. A rendering engine is the brains behind your Web browser that takes the HTML and CSS code and renders it into a viewable Web page. If you're a user of the Safari browser, the rendering engine it uses is known as WebCore.
Unlike Firefox, Camino is a 100% pure Mac OS X application based off Apple's Cocoa frameworks. Firefox, on the other hand, is based off a cross-platform scripting language known as XUL. While this gives the powerful browser the advantage of being cross platform, many Mac users, myself included, complain about the stickiness of the UI and the fact that it doesn't necessarily have the look Mac users have come to expect from their applications. Camino also is able to use native Mac OS X features such as the system's built-in spell checker, the services menu and system Keychain.
In addition to it's rendering engine, Camino features all of the functionality you've come to expect from a Mac browser. It has support for tabbed browsing, which enables you to open multiple Web pages in a single browser window.
Camino also has support for RSS feed detection, so any page that has embedded a tag that describes it's RSS feed, will show an RSS icon allowing you to subscribe to the feed in your preferred news reader. Unlike Firefox or Safari, Camino is not a feed reader itself.
New to Camino 1.5 is a session saving feature that allows you to reload all of the pages you were viewing the last time you quit Camino with a single button click. In addition, if Camino happens to crash, it is able to restore your previous browser state, so you don't lose any pages you might have been viewing. This feature is a life saver that isn't possible in Safari without the use of third-party plugins.
Daily Browsing
I've spent the past few days using Camino as my default Web browser instead of Safari and I am happy to report that the transition was seamless. When you launch Camino, you are given the option of importing your bookmarks from another browser such as Safari or Firefox. In addition, if you have a bookmarks file from another browser (or another platform) Camino can try to parse it and import your bookmarks from it.
Bookmark management in Camino is a direct descendent from the management methodology implemented in Safari. Instead of having a long menu of bookmarks as you would in IE or Firefox, Camino features a bookmark management view that gives you an overview of all of your bookmarks in an organized hierarchy. You can browse your bookmarks, modify them or search for that obscure link you just can't remember but you know you archived in the past. One unique feature to Camino's bookmarks manager is the Top Ten List, which lists your ten most popular bookmarks based on how many times you view them. The top ten list is also used, by default, as the list of bookmarks available in Camino's dock menu.
Beyond bookmarks, the most important aspect of a Web browser is it's rendering speed. I didn't notice any discernible difference in page load speeds using Camino instead of Safari. One issue I have noticed with loading pages in Camino is that it doesn't initially draw the page until much later in the loading process than Safari. Several times I thought a page was stalling since nothing was rendering on the page, but would find that, with patience, the page would most certainly render beautifully on the screen. In addition to the page drawing issue, I also have found it difficult to see how far along the rendering of a specific page is since Camino lacks the visual title bar progress indicator that I have come to love in Safari. Camino does show the progress in a small progress indicator in the lower-right corner of the window, but I can't seem to train my eyes to look down after typing in a URL. I expect to see the progress right in front of me.
My only other major complaint with Camino as a daily browser is the lack of .Mac synchronization of my bookmarks between multiple machines. I have come to expect this after using Safari for so long. I have developed a workaround of using Everyday Software's BookIt to keep my Camino bookmarks in sync with Safari. I honestly don't use offline bookmarks nearly as much as I did three years ago since online services such as del.icio.us make it so easy to store that information on the Web, but for private links or stuff that you just don't think is worthy of sharing with the rest of the Web, being able to sync local bookmarks is a must.
The Verdict
If you're a casual browser or even a power user Camino is an excellent choice for a daily browser. Those that rely on Firefox extensions or Safari plugins such as Saft or SafariStand may not enjoy Camino nearly as much since they may lose certain functionality, but I don't believe Camino was developed to match those power user's desires. While Camino does have a plugin architecture, the choices available aren't nearly as vast as those in Firefox. Nonetheless, you should check out Pimp My Camino to see the list of available plugins.
I am going to continue using Camino as my default browser at least until Mac OS X Leopard ships. As a longtime Safari user, I grew tired of the massive memory leak that would bog my system down after several hours of usage. Camino is fast, responsive and beautiful: all the things I look for in a Mac application.
When Leopard ships, I will reevaluate my decision, and we'll see if Safari can regain it's position in my Dock.
Justin Williams is founder and chief author for MacZealots. He switched to the Mac almost five years ago hasn't looked back since. When not blogging or coding, you can find him watching copious amounts of TV. Justin can be reached at
Reader Comments (3)
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#1) On June 9, 2007 10:57 AM
nicely written review, the only thing i would add is Camino not only has tabbed browsing, it also was first mac browser to do so, long before Safari and firefox.
#2) On June 12, 2007 1:59 AM
I miss the page rendering info in the URL field as well. I’m trying Netscape Navigator 9 and it uses the lower right as the rendering info location too.
#3) On January 29, 2008 2:12 AM
Hi all !!!
End ^) See you