Camino: Supermodel of a Browser?
Being a Mac user, I’ve always had a problem with Firefox. I’ve thought long and hard about tasteful analogies for my relationship with it, but I keep coming back to a somewhat shallow one: Firefox is like the girl in school who you knew you should probably date because she’s intelligent, multilingual, and funny, but she just wasn’t very attractive to you.
Safari, on the other hand, has been the opposite: Hot as hell and lives right down the street, but offers little more than instant gratification of primal needs.
Many people who can’t stand to be without both types of relationships have evolved into “browser polygamists”… or, people who use multiple browsers during their normal daily routine. Jon Hicks could be considered the king of the Browser Polygamy movement, hopping from application to application with the recklessness of a late 70s porn star. Jon likes multiple browsers, and he’s not ashamed to admit it.
I, on the other hand, have never liked using multiple apps for any chore, whether it be browsing, e-mail, design, code, or whatever else. I want a single point of entry into whatever I’m doing.
And so it was with great interest that I started playing around with the latest Camino betas a couple of months ago. Camino you say? Wasn’t that a truck that late 70s porn stars drove around in? Nope, that’s the “El Camino“. This is Camino, the web browser; an application I remember using back when it was called “Chimera” in the early OS X days.
Camino is like Firefox with a beautiful makeover. I’m not talking about Lee Press-On Nails and an Ogilvie Home Perm… I’m talking an X-Code workout regimen, a healthy diet of Cocoa, and a Quartz mineral bath. Think of Firefox as Paris Hilton — gets all the press, will compile for anybody, and is a bit strange looking. Think of Camino as younger sister Nicky — much cuter, a bit more refined, and up until now in the shadow of her sister.
Anyway, with today’s announcement of the official 1.0 version, Camino has finally emerged from the shadow of its older sister to become a true contender in the Mac browser space. It looks better than Safari and it feeler faster than Firefox… that’s a great start. Here are some more things I am loving about Camino:
- It’s a snap to import all of your Safari bookmarks.
- The interface is outstanding. Not only is it truly Mac-ish in appearance, but as mentioned above, it’s actually more visually appealing to me than Safari.
- It’s faster than Firefox in all ways, and it seems faster than Safari in certain, but not all occasions. When browsing from page to page within a site (viz. when all JS and CSS are already in cache) you can barely even see the pages repaint. It does seem a tad slower on full page fetches, but as Camino team member Samuel Sidler says, “speed is subjective”.
- Safari’s preferences are limited, but in Camino, almost everything is configurable. Apple’s decision to keep Safari simple isn’t a bad one, as most casual Mac users don’t want to see 1000 options in front of their faces (see: Adium… which I love, by the way), but it is really nice to have a good, highly configurable browser to use again.
- A more comprehensive History display.
- It supports all of the same WYSIWYG web editors that every other browser besides Safari does. Incidentally, this is really my only major beef with Safari from an internals perspective as this point. But it’s a huge beef.
- Everything Hicksy says here and Om says here.
What don’t I like about Camino? Well, really only three things:
- The seemingly slight lag in full-page fetches (although I could be imagining this).
- The lack of a Javascript debugger and other extensions.
- No native spellchecking.
So with that, I will now be trying out Camino as my primary browser for the next month or so. If you’re lookin’ for a change, I recommend you do the same.
Note: Observant readers may notice that I first compare Firefox to a smart woman and then to Paris Hilton. Two separate analogies. Try not to confuse them.
I just downloaded Camino this afternoon, and within 20 minutes I decided to use it as my primary browser. It’s really slick.
CamiTools is a must have for an even greater level of customization.
At first my only gripe was a ‘find as you type’ search on the page. come to find out all I have to do is type “/” then my search term, and watch the status bar. By golly, there’s my search terms as it highlights it in the page. a simple cmd+G move me to the next instance. Beautiful.
I’m gonna give Camino another try.
Your Note at the end made my day. :D
I love your browser analogies. But you forgot one.
Omniweb is the old movie-star who hasn’t had a hit in forever, he’s looking for a comeback in a bad way. Sure, no one will notice much when he makes his move, but people who have been fans from the beginning will revel.
Oliver: Ha! You’re totally right. In fact, OmniWeb was the first browser that really got me excited about OS X. It was the first browser that rendered Quartz type with edgeless windows. Let’s see, what girl is a good analogy for that…
I would say maybe OmniWeb is like Christie Brinkley or Elle McPherson. It ushered in the modern age of beauty in browsers but hasn’t made an impact since the new stars took over.
You and I are simpatico my friend. I feel the same way about Firefox and Safari and took notice of Camino going 1.0 today. I was leaning towards giving it an honest try as my primary browser.
So far I only have one complaint. When I click a link that opens a new window using the target=”_blank” command, I want that to open in a new tab automatically. I don’t want to have to hold down CMD + Click or right-click and choose open in a new tab. I have this behavior in Firefox and that’s why Safari could never be my full time browser (unless I wanted to pay for the Saft plugin). I’ve looked all over the preferences and even tried to configure the prefs.js file but I can’t get it to do this one, simple thing.
Any of your readers know how I can accomplish this?
Chris, at the moment you can’t do exactly as you want—you can make those links open in the same (current) tab, though—because when the feature was orginally implemented in Gecko by Firefox developers, it was done in a way that Camino couldn’t use it :-( But the feature has recently been reworked and the full set of options will be available in a future Camino version.
See this page for instructions on enabling Camino to redirect target=”_blank” links into the same tab.
Mike, Safari called me last night in tears. And, judging from the post 10.4.4 crashes I’ve been having, she was a bit drunk. Camino might be the new girl in town, but you’ll go back to Safari in no time. Besides, you’re only attracted to Camino because she bought the same dress mail.app’s been wearing. Safari is still trotting around in brushed metal but she’ll move on.
As an aside: Wow, comparing browsers to women is pretty much the height of nerdity.
I’ve been using Chimera/Camino occassionally since version 0.3, but I never found any equivalent to the Web Developer Toolbar in Firefox. I really miss this one.
Wonderful analogies! Thanks for making me laugh first thing a dull Wednesday morning… :-)
Uncle Asad:
Thanks for the information, I wish you had a better answer for me. Hopefully this will be implemented in Camino soon. Especially since it was those bastard gecko developers that got me hooked on tabbed browsing. Actually…wasn’t it the original Chimera developer that created tabbed browsing then was hired by Apple to lead the Safari team?
I digress. I did see the target _blank into the same window hint when I was searching Google for a way to get that working but that behavior is so last century.
I grew sick of Firefox over a month ago, which prompted me to switch over to Safari as my primary browser, but it was never the only browser I used. I was still using Firefox to develop websites.
Why? The Developer Toolbar. I can’t live without my web developer toolbar.
I’m like you Mike, I want only one browser. But until Camino has a web developer toolbar that rivals Firefox’s WebDev Toolbar, I still have to use Firefox.
This is a really great statement:
“Firefox is like the girl in school who you knew you should probably date because she’s intelligent, multilingual, and funny, but she just wasn’t very attractive to you.”
Really funny ;)
Does everyone on this page own a Mac??!!
I’ll stick with FireFox on Windows until Opera *finally* fix that silly favicon bug thats stopping me from using it as my prime browser. It may be a small thing, but I love my favicons ;)
No mention anywhere of integrated RSS, that’s one big black mark on the pristine white finish, Mike. Granted most of you probably use NetNewsWire (or a quasi-worthy equivalent), I have never been able to burn so fast through my 700+ daily RSS articles since using Safari’s internal reader. Sure it’s a bit sloppy, but effective as hell and to the point. If Camino emulated this with native speed and efficiency (and not just as an extension), I’d be completely sold.
Close, but not quite. It does replace DeerPark G4 as my alternate browser though.
Camino is actually older than Firefox :)
Hahaha Love the analogies!! really hit home the point. NICE!!
Since I installed the Grapple Firefox theme, I switched to Firefox full time.
http://www.takebacktheweb.org/
Camino’s always been odd-man-out for me. Or odd-girl-out, as the case may be. Firefox is ugly, but I can get some WORK done on it (web dev toolbar, aardvark, etc), and safari is just there, acting so willing… Camino can’t do the heavy lifting FF can, and hasn’t given me a compelling advantage over safari to bother migrating.
Just an aside that if you’re cool with a non-official build, my Firefox optimized builds mash Camino’s form widgets and Firefox together, which does help. Using the Grapple Firefox themes helps, too, or the Safire Milk theme (though it does seem perverse to have to resort to theming an application to get it to look more integrated).
Love Camino, but as I bitched about on Jon’s site the View Source in a tab “feature” has got to go. Luckily, I got an email from a Camino developer who says this will be addressed in Camino 1.1, but for now it’s annoying enough to prevent me from using it.
I am now making a t-shirt for Jon proclaiming his browser “lifestyle” to the world. :)
I am giving Camino another try as well. I am an avid Firefox user on my PC at work, and have always used it on my Powerbook. However, I have noticed it lagging quite a bit lately, mainly when I first launch it. Camino seems peppier. I don’t know why, but I have never really been a fan of Safari.
So far, Camino is a great browser. Super-fast, easy to import my Firefox bookmarks. It doesn’t include an RSS reader (at least I haven’t seen evidence of one), but I use NetNewsWire for that anyway. Would be nice to see some sort of Feed Notification in the browser.
The few times I can actually access a Mac (School) I always use Camino. It looks pretty simple from the outside, but its inner workings are genius.
Love the Paris Hilton analogy. She makes my skin crawl. Ewww.
I’m like Jon, jumping between browsers all day.
I’d like to stay in Camino, except I like Safari’s text-shadow CSS properties and Firefox’s Javascript Console and RSS functionality (I’m not a newsreader junkie).
Many thanks for posting information about this browser. I am a recent convert to the Mac (long time casual user, never previously owned one) and I’ve had the same experience with Firefox as you’ve stated in your post. As much as I love Firefox on my Windows machines, it just doesn’t perform as well on the Mac. I’ll be downloading Camino as soon as I get home this evening.
Your post leads me into a broader subject: For the recently converted, what does a long-time user’s list of top websites/utilities/tools/etc. for the Mac consist of? Googling for such a list leaves me unsatisfied, and I’m really interested in such a list from the perspective of a creative director.
I’m loving my iMac, but I don’t quite feel like I’m using it as much as used my Windows machines. I’m chalking it up to mild lack of familiarity and limited range of tools, etc. Any ideas would be extremely appreciated. Thanks!
Great synopsis. I’ve been a Camino user since 0.7, I believe.
However, I have whored out to just about every other interesting looking variant out there, including Flock. Shiira has been my latest fling, but when Camino hit 1.0, I couldn’t put up with Shiira’s random crashing, as sexy as it is with it’s sidebar.
Camino just does it right, although in the 0.8 series I ran into a few crashing webpages. I’ll have yet to see how 1.0 works out.
Been testing Camino since 0.6 maybe?
I use a FF extension to sync my bookmarks between multiple machines. Somehow I’ve locked myself into that, and I never lock myself into anything. Sad, isn’t it?
But like I told someone else just days before 1.0, “The speed of Cocoa compells me.” Camino is a win.
Now let me sync my bookmarks with FF on Windows.
The anthropomorphization of all elements Mac is nearly complete. I’m just waiting for the day someone names their kid Safari.
In an unholy turn of name dropping, I saw Nikki Hilton at Spago in Vegas on new years, and yes, she is definitely the winner of the sisters. I’d rather use Paris to open letters with.
Camino was my browser of choice when I moved back to a mac in the 10.1-2 era. Safari stole me away for a while, but I’ve been full time Camino for probably half a year now. Oh, and to get the browser to ignore target=”_blank” (ie, single window mode), get CamiTools (search on VersionTracker/macupdate).
Oh and Mike… there’s an unhealthy level of 70s porn references in your post. Are you trying to tell us something?
It’s entries like this that keep me coming back to mikeindustries.
Very good stuff. Will have to give Camino a try.
Paris who? :)
Ok, if Camino is a supermodel, Safari is the girl next door, and Firefox is the cool chick w/o sex appeal…..what does that make Internet Explorer?
@Calvin
I guess that puts IE somewhere… hmmm… right next to… my grandma.
@Mike
Loved this post Mike, great stuff. Keep up the good work.
All this Camino talk wants me to try it out again…
I want all standardistas who write fanboy articles about browsers (of any gender) to start with the requirement that a browser must save its open tabs under all conditions. If it can’t do that, I can’t use it. Browser tabs are our unsaved documents.
(I have never gotten Saft to work and resent having to pay money for a basic function equivalent to Save in a word processor. TabMix [“MeowMix”] Plus works OK on Firefox. Then there’s Opera.)
Haaaa, those analogies are so well crafted yet so wonderfully simple and apllicable. Very good indeed.
Unfortunately, I’m not an Apple user so I can’t partake in this web browser orgy.
I’ll just have to stick with my one love, Firefox, while Opera pouts in the background, and IE hangs out in the corner, trying to look interested by a houseplant.
Opera on Windows is the actor that’s got the greatest acting feats, greatest personality, and greatest looks. But due to some interventions Opera’s had before, its image in the users mind will never change, as it just looks and is dumb – Ashton Kutcher.
PS. A key piece of the browser polygamist’s, er, arsenal is Bookit. I believe it’s developed by one of the Panic developers on his spare time, and it’s absolutely essential.
I’ve never liked Safari. Google being the unchangeable default in Safari is highly annoying. I don’t use Google and I don’t want to use Google — for anything. Firefox, and now a 1.0 Camino. Wow! Choices. A lot of geeks just got a new default browser in Camino. Camino now makes Opera look like a tired old burro. Sarai always looked cheap and unimpressive anyway, but Camino? Wow! Elegant.
I just wanted to say that I’ve got Camino running now and I am loving it! It’s like Firefox, only with the one feature I was constantly longing for…. PROPER ZOOMING! I’m on a Powerbook, so I am all about the keyboard shortcuts.
For Safari, I remapped Zoom to Apple-Shift-Z and it works great. Firefox unfortunately never seemed to support this (this is the only thing I hate about NetNewsWire, as well). I am pleased to see that in Camino, Zooming works perfectly!
Now if Camino could support Live Bookmarks with preferences for # of entries to retain, I would be in heaven. Maybe I’ll drop the developer a line (they are probably swamped right now, though) :D
Mike…I totally agree! I’ve switched over to Camino totally. I even imported each bookmark from the past 10 years into Camino! You also have to check out CamiTools which allows you to sync your bookmarks over FTP which firefox does, but not very well. It works seemlessly between my G5 and powerbook. Thanks Jon for the CamiTools link!
Rob –
You can change default search in Safari:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030514035516436
Peace.
I would love to hear some comparably good analogies for Opera, IE (especially that shite-ball old IE Mac), and hell, even Lynx, and Blazer.
I agree with Devon’s comment regarding Camino’s lack of RSS capabilities – integrated RSS is the one thing that is holding me back from declaring Camino as my primary browser. Hopefully they’ll include it in the next release. Until then, I’ll stick with Firefox and Safari.
So, what then is iCab?
How about: had a small but rabidly cultish following back in the day, but was from another country. When she moved to your neck of the woods, a few people checked her out. She was nice, and said all the right things, but the supermodel up the street got all the attention.
Ok, that’s a horrible analogy.
So, who knows what the “cab” in iCab stands for?
Give up?
“Crystal Atari Browser.” It was THE web browser back in the day on Atari ST/STe/TT/Falcon computers. Used to be called simply “CAB”. When the creator ported it to OSX, it became iCab.
So far with Camino, I miss:
I like:
ive had a few beers, so she’s pretty cute, but dave nailed it – activity monitor is a must-have for me.
think im gonna drunk-dial safari until camino grows up a bit.
Want more analogies?
Some women are like Internet Explorer…
So far so good, I like it. What I miss:
@ Tony
Interesting, the iCab/Atari thing. I didn’t know that but I feel I should point out that the browser sported the i in its name in its OS9- incarnation. I recall that when I tried it on the old OS it rendered very like Netscape 4.x so it was soon discarded.
When Camino supports RSS, which is high on the TODO list, it may well become my browsing browser. I’m currently using FF (as a RSS reader) alongside it because Camino has ad-blocking out-of-the-box and I can’t be arsed to fiddle about with, or pay for, Safari 1.3 additions. There are some plug-in rendering issues which seem to be the fault of Gecko as FF has them too and it uses Command-= to enlarge text (What’s wrong with the more logical Command-+?) but I rather like it.
Is Camino perfect? No. Is it good enough? Very nearly.
Nikki 1 : Paris 0
Ah will definatly download camino after reading this article.. just need my powerbook to be home :D
My impression so far is mixed. It sure seems like a great browser, it’s snappy, somewhat sexy (though I still prefer the dazzle of Safari) and it has a host of great features, for sure. I’s a decent 1.0.
On the other hand, it lacks decent font rendering. This is terrible, and the prime reason I never use Firefox. It just doesn’t feel native. The way it treats italic text, for example. Horrible, when compared to Safari.
Two other things it lacks, but which by no means invalidates it as a great browser are features I miss sorely from Firefox: The ability to just type something in the adress-bar, and let the browser do an “I’m feeling lucky”-search, and the ability to just hit Alt+D to get me to the adress-bar. I’d be even more happy with it was possile with Cmd+D.
There you have it. Better font rendering (and support for text-shadow :-)), and I’m a switcher.
I won’t deny there are cases where font rendering is sub-par, but I’ve never noticed an issue with italics in Camino. The italicized text on this page looks more-or-less the same in Camino as in Safari, for instance.
As for the other two items Marcus mentioned, Camino uses the standard Mac shortcut of Cmd-L to focus the location bar ;-) You can remap it using the feature provided in the Keyboard and Mouse pane of the System Preferences, though. I’m Feeling Lucky is supported but not enabled by default; see the Hidden Prefs documentation.
While I see a lot of improvement in Camino, and I like it as a browser, it’s just not enough for me. I like some of the features of Safari, no matter how small and I just can’t live without them. Small features such as true auto-complete (without having to hit the down key), RSS (I don’t see how anyone can function with a separate aggregator for their web content) and a few other small functions.
There are other small things in Camino which make me think I wish I had that in Safari and frankly the brushed metal effect is getting old, but then again… How could anything be better than Safari right now? Damn, I can’t live without a spell check just for a start!
Matt,
That brushed metal is ugly, isn’t it? I’ve always disliked it. It reminds me of those cheesy web page templates from places like GeoCities back in like 1998. Camino is beautiful — simple and elegant. Opera still looks like hell on a Mac. Carbon. iCab is OK looking, but IMO, the best looking, and best operating browsers on the Mac are Camino and OmniWeb.
@Rob Yeah, Camino is by far the nicest looking of the browsers out there (not just for OS X, obviously). I am actually using it now; mainly thanks to Mike and Jon. I don’t like using third party apps where there is already a good alternative shipped with the OS, and I don’t like not having spell check and I don’t like running 2 or 3 applications while I could run one (ie. RSS)… But I have been convinced to give it a little longer and am trying Newsfire as an RSS aggregator also which I quite like at the moment. Updates to follow for sure.
I love Camino and have been using it since I got a Mac, but the one thing that I can’t stand is that within an hour of browsing, Camino starts to lag and I mean lag. Memory usage goes up to 900 Megabytes and cpu usage varies from anywhere to 40% to 90%. I have even tried using the optimized builds but they still are almost as bad. Otherwise, Camino is great.
Oh dear me, what a world we live in!
I find your women analogies highly amusing as, having read some of the comments on this site, I cannot imagine that any of you have ever had contact with a woman. Why not turn your computers off and venture out of your basements?
What a coincidence, #55, my fiancee’s name is Stacey also!
So back on topic, what’s the likelyhood that Camino can get compatible with Firefox extensions? Now THAT would be a serious browser.
#55: Because then, Stacey, we’d never have the opportunity of meeting you, who from this side of the keyboard appear to be exactly what is missing in our lives.
Mike: I know Camino uses Gecko, but I am finding weird rendering variations between it and Firefox (sometimes divs will just flat out disappear). Until that problem is solved, Camino reminds me too much of my college girlfriend: Nice looking, but ultimately broken in a way I can’t fix. :-)
so far it’s not bad, but two things seem to really be annoying me.
1. in my experience, camino is sufficiently slower than safari. maybe this was the lag in page loads you (mike) were talking about, however it seems to be extreme, especially when opening multiple tabs at once.
2. apparently you can’t drag images from within camino into the dock to have them open in some application. this has really driven me crazy, because i’m always grabbing the odd image from the web and dropping it into photoshop.
on a lesser note, i wish there was a smaller disparity between the length of the address field and the google search bar. i almost never need to see entire urls (which is often possible on a 21″ display), whereas it’s much more important to see more than 15 characters of my search terms.
When I can copy and paste into Mail.app and keep the formatting and images, I’ll think about switching (that part about not being able to drag an image out is too annoying to tolerate as well). Until then it’s Safari for browsing and Firefox with the Web Developer toolbar for web development (you can’t beat that combo).
It’s a nice browser, really (so is FF), but those two missing features bring me back to Safari every time.
(In case anybody was going to mention it, Thunderbird is not an option, it just doesn’t stand up to Mail.app IMHO).
[…] A very accosting layout and a interesting discussion topic, do you provide any Web-based services to universities or students. […] – Sorry for the stupid question :-)
Everyone loves web browser/supermodel analogies…
And Mike Davidson brings us an excellent article on Camino reaching 1.0….
Camino
I’ve been busy, and neglecting of my gentle audience. I apologize – I’ll be back to posting again soon. In the mean time I couldn’t not post about this… If you are on a Mac you must try Camino!…
Camino: �much cuter, a bit more refined.�
Achtung, Nerdcontent: Wenn Mac-Nutzer über ihren Computer und dessen Zubehör sprechen, dann oft sehr emotional. Apple-CEO Steve Jobs, der die eigentlichen Höhepunkte seiner Keynotes oft im Rausgehen präsentiert (�One more thing..�)…
Camino Web Browser
En el Blog de Mike Industries me llamó la atención un post sobre Camino, un navegador.
Según él nos cuenta, tiene los siguientes pros:
It’s a snap to import all of your Safari bookmarks.
The interface is outstanding. Not only is it truly Mac-is…
Funny thing, I always thought the full-page load lag for Camino obvious.
Firefox is slow as hell, both on my Mac and PC. Can’t seem to figure out why.
Opera is the best, though, better than either Camino, FF, or Safari. Among other things, it has Mail, IRC, widget engine, and a ton of other features all bundled in together with the web browser, plus it’s way faster and way more secure. It also has this trash can feature that’s like the “Recently Opened Tabs” in the History menu in FF, except you don’thave to go through a menu to get to it. Waaay better.
http://www.opera.com
(note: admittedly, this poost was read and the comment made in Camino)
Love the analogy for FireFox and Safari, so true. I think it’s a little bit different today, now that Lion is out and Safari just “works” better with the Mac, but funny nonetheless.