“After fifteen months of hard work, the Camino Project is pleased to announce the release of Camino 1.5, a substantial update to the popular Camino 1.0 web browser. Based on Mozilla’s Gecko 1.8.1 rendering engine, Camino 1.5 includes some brand-new, exciting features to make surfing the web even easier.” New features include inline spell-checking, feed detection, session saving, and tabbed browsing improvements. Camino is a fantastic OS X native browser that is generally more compatible than Safari. The Camino Project also launched a new website to coincide with their browser milestone.
Camino 1.5 Released
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Adam Scheinberg
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Camino is a fantastic OS X native browser that is generally more compatible than Safari.
But also a lot heavier resource-wise; both on my 450Mhz Cube, as well as my (already sold) iBook G4 1Ghz, Camino was VERY slow compared to Safari. You won’t notice this on a new and/or fast Mac, of course.
In other words, maybe more compatible than Safari, but it does come at a price. Not at all unimportant to mention.
Perhaps. But I find Safari lacking in many critical areas for me, not in the least the ability to open a new tab with a button, which doesn’t exist (unless you hack one http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050430171056385). And Safari doesn’t work with Google Docs. And Safari’s KHTML is tough for a web developer because it doesn’t render pages the same way as most popular browser, whereas Camino uses the same rendering engine as Firefox.
So while I do like Safari, I don’t use it nearly as much.
I use Firefox on my iBook G4 and yes it’s slower, but there’s a handful of extensions I “can’t” live without.
Also, it bugs me that I can’t put separators in Safari’s Bookmarks menu. I’ve got a bunch, and they’re better organized in Firefox.
I wouldn’t call Firefox and Camino “VERY slow” compared to Safari; maybe I just surf slow sites all the time, but I’ve never noticed a huge difference between the two.
YMMV of course, and everyone has different needs. It’s great having lots of choice (Safari, Opera, OmniWeb, Firefox, Camino, etc.).
– chrish
I just checked OSNews in the new Camino, and lo – the circle is complete.
Camino is pleasant, but I’m smitten with Firebug, The UNO Theme and everything else.
I’m not liking where the Firefox UI is going though for version 3. Few Moz-bloggers are concerned about the UI bloat. I’ve already had to install a handful of extensions to keep v2’s barrage of toolbar buttons and widgets under control.
Actually, what I miss in Camino is:
1) a decent JS debugger (or even an error console!)
2) draggable tabs (on sched for 1.6)
3) a better tab scroller
That’s about all, but sometimes, it hurts. We developement in OS X usually means using FF or Opera too.
I have to agree on Firefox 3. It seems to me like they’re integrating too much right into it. This adds up to more memory consumption and CPU cycles to do the same things we’ve always done while being distracted by bells and whistles.
I hope Mozilla hasn’t forgotten Firefox’s roots and the ultimate failure that was Mozilla Suite (in terms of marketshare not quality). Firefox’s strength is in its extensions and this is what a number of Firefox 3’s features need to be.
My concern is that the answer to everything in Firefox is to add a new default button on the toolbar, or icon next to the location drop down.
I like having back/forward, ‘stop or reload’, location bar and search box and that’s it.
I had to remove the home button, the go buttons from the location and search boxes, the throbber and combine the stop and go buttons.
And there’s ideas of adding yet more buttons and widgets to the toolbar for Ffx3, including Places, new phising UI, new cert validation UI, Microformats, livemarks and so on…
The only way to get the simplicity I expect in a browser, like Safari & Camino, is to install a clutch of extensions and tweaks. It’s getting like Windows, and I moved away from that already.
Congrats to all who work on Camino, it’s a fantastic browser and still a very valuable asset on OSX considering many Jscript-heavy sites do not work well on Safari (here’s looking at you, Google Calendar).
I still wish Camino scrolled as smoothly as Safari
Great stuff.
Safari is a good browser, and I never have any problems with it, unless it comes to caching.
Caching with Safari makes me want to hurt people, especially on some sites like forums, hitting the back button will take you back to page that was a few days ago or a week ago.
Plus the amount of times spend developing a webpage, and you have to hit refresh half a dozen times for it to figure out what’s going on.
As for not having a button on Safari to open a new tab, I do find it very odd that people don’t use shortcuts, much much quicker than having to click on the mouse.
Apple + T and bam, opened a tab, very quick, and it’s already in the URL section, a quick tab and you can search google all very quickly.
I do think that testing and criticizing a browser on an old computer like the cubes is pretty unreasonable. The iBook G4 I can understand, that’s not too bad, and I’ve run Camino on an iBook, and it runs fine, its quite snappy, so I really think there’s something else going on there.
That said, I don’t think Camino is perfect, there’s a few other things I’d like to see etc, but it’s pretty good, and much much faster than Firefox, Firefox would probably be the slowest thing on my Mac at times.
I usually just use Firefox with the GrApple theme, but this Camino release makes me think long and hard about which way I want to go. After trying it for a few hours, I have to admit that it’s very polished and well-integrated. The only thing holding me back from a complete switch is my extensions. However, they are pretty important for me, so unfortunately, I can’t switch just yet. The web is never the same without Google preview, Adblock Plus and Linkification.
Still, if Firefox was stock, I would use Camino in a heartbeat.
How do you get the Spell Check window to come up? Have tried the normal OSX Keyboard Shortcuts and nothing.
Otherwise I like the new version. Been using Camino for a long time now along with Safari.
Edit; Figured it out, It Underlines a word that is misspelled and you CTRL-Click on that word and it pops up.
Edited 2007-06-06 08:09
… Inquisitor
http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/
If david were to port that to Camino…
I like Inquisitor Also. Hope they do port it over.
…used to be my primary browser after OmniWeb took wayyyyy too long to update to WebKit. Solid browser. Now I am back to OmniWeb and can’t use anything else.
Inquisitor IS a great addition to Safari! Wish OmniWeb had some sort of plugin interface or something. But at least it (OW) finally works posting to threads in OSNews.