Mozilla has just released version 0.8.3 of its Camino browser for Mac OS X, which uses the Gecko browsing engine with a Cocoa user interface. Release notes here.
Camino 0.8.3 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
For those of you that haven’t tried this, it’s just about the best browsers I’ve ever seen on any platform. If you have a mac, give it a try. I run Firefox under Windows and Linux, but when it comes to OSX, Camino hits the spot.
Firefox is sluggish on my old G4, so I use Safari.
The day the get mozilla extensions running on Camino, it will be my default browser. Until that day theres really no reason.
that really is what it is all about for me as well….
I love the search extensions in Firefox… why the heck is camino not able to run them!!! arg!!!
Camino is my backbrowser for Safari on my iBook, beautiful little browser, I hope they get even better.
You are in for a long wait then. Extensions for FireFox use XUL, which is replaced by Cocoa in Camino.
Depending on what you need there are a few extensions available for Camino. I use the platform optimized daily builds and prefer the speed and handling of Camino for web browsing. I guess it comes down to personal taste.
Well, unlike Safari (and fellow KHTML browser Konqueror) it handles the formatting facilities in Movable Type and WordPress properly. I use those more regularly than inbuilt Google searches.
just be aware not all the mirrors have it yet. i do like the new camino site.
I had the same thought on Slashdot recently (Camino would be nice if it supported Firefox extensions), and got an interesting response from someone:
The abundance of extensions for Firefox is in no small part thanks to the way the interface was handled (XUL.) Most of them would be useless in Safari even if it used Gecko, just like Camino can’t currently use Firefox extensions either. To make them usable you’d have to adopt both the front-end and back-end of Firefox. And if you’re going to do that, you might as well just use Firefox itself.
It doesn’t really bother me… With Saferfox for my theme, Firefox under OSX simply rocks these days (Well… Ya gotta throw in USB overdrive so that I can make all the buttons on my MX1000 mouse work, but still…)
Camino is an interesting project, and this most recent download is impressive (tried it last night!), but it’s not likely to sway me from Firefox anytime soon.
I used to be a die hard Camino user myself till I found out they had no intentions of ever adding an RSS agregator into the browser because it’d be “sluggish & bloated.” I think by now Safari & Firefox have proven them dead wrong.
Camino has been my favorite browser for a while now. It looks much nicer than Firefox, and doesn’t have the annoyances of Safari.
Camino seems to run faster than Firefox on my G5. uhmmmm….
-2501
…but I prefer Camino. I like it better than safari because it seems to render pages better… even on my own website.
I do wonder what the future holds for it tho’… I love the RSS feature of Firefox and now Safari will have it. Right now I use a separate application for RSS aggregation.
It would be nice if they came up with their own extension/plug-in schema… one that it made it easy to develop plugins for it. On the other hand, I like how lite it is now.
I also keep Omniweb around to use. I guess I am a browser junky.
I use Camino quite a bit (I’m posting from it now) but it doesn’t work well with Zope External Editor. Firefox and Seamonkey both do, though, so I have to keep at least one of them around.
http://www.zope.org/Members/Feneric/ExtEditMacOSX/
I would use Firefox, but due to the fact that, quite frankly, the MacOS platform as the red headed step child of the family, I’m certainly not going to settle for the crappy attempt to bring it inline with the MacOS HIG or the fact that in the last 2 years, they can’t even be bothered using Quartz and Aqua widgets for forms.
On my G3 iBook, Camino is simply faster than Firefox. This is true for both startup speed (4 seconds compared to 9 seconds) and user interface speed. I am a little disappointed to learn that they have no intention of supporting RSS feeds though…
Contrary to what much people say, firefox (and camino) are not lightweight browsers. I was hoping that killing XUL would reduce firefox’s bloat but this is not the case. On my powerbook, camino with 2 sites in tabs eats 22% of my ram, while 4 tabs in safari eats only 17%. Also, safari loads 2 seconds earlier
Fair enough. But if Camino is chewing 22% of your RAM with 2 tabs you either have a seriously screwed install of Camino or very little ram. I have 10 tabs open right now across 2 windows and am using 48.66MB of RAM. That would not even be 20% of the lowest base configuration available today (256MB) much less the recommended minimum (512MB)
Just 3 tabs across 2 windows in Safari is chewing up more than that (51.42). The conparison on my side is not fair though. I have adblocking on in an optimized build of Camino as well as only cycling animated images only once.
When I turned all blocking off the RAM usage for Camino increased to 54.22MB. The same pages for Safari came to 61.36. Over long term Camino and Firefox will chew up more RAM than Safari though. Both FF and Camino use a dynamic in-memory cache when memory is free. This is not harmful when the memory is available and not done when it is not so it is a win – win scenario. The in memory cache can be disabled though if the memory usage disturbs a user though (using CEP in Camino, not sure of the procedure on FF).
what do you mean by an “optimized build”. Where do you download them? I’m liking Camino better than Safari recently, It may be because I don’t care about RSS feeds and extensions.
http://camino.ilnm.com/
Keep in mind these are the daily builds though and so ae not always stable.
While there are no immediate plans to support RSS, Josh Aas, one of Camino’s lead developers, has insisted that in his spare time, he is going to implement the format. The actual style of implementation is still in discussions, but more than likely, you’ll see RSS in 1.0.
As of late Safari has been dog slow and suffering from quite a few beach balls. So, switched to Camino, much faster than Safari. I’m happy with it.
Safari with 6 tabs open uses 6 threads and 43.66 MB of RAM. Camino viewing the same sites uses 14 threads and takes 50.13 MB RAM. Looks like Safari is lighter weight on my system.