Camino: Heavy on performance, light on community

If you're a Mac user with a need for speed, you'll struggle to find a better browser than Mozilla's Camino. Apple's Safari will win a drag race, but it lacks the customizability that comes with an open-source browser like Camino. Unfortunately, both Safari and Camino fall incredibly short against Firefox because both are heavy on speed and light on community.

For those who want a highly optimized, lightning fast browsing experience on the Mac, you can't do much better than Camino, as TechCrunch writes. But most of us want more than that. We want Adblock Plus to filter out ads from our browsing experience. We want Bitly Preview to be able to launch and track tweets from the browser. And more.

Sure, you can "PimpMyCamino," but you won't get nearly the level of detailing that comes with Firefox's impressive community. It's not hard, technically, to migrate from Firefox to Camino, but in the move you're going to end up losing most of the add-ons that make Firefox so powerful.

Camino has ad-blocking functionality built into the browser, and you can find an array of themes to dress it up. But really, the primary reason to use Camino is if you want raw speed. But if that's all you want, Safari is likely a better choice, given the somewhat limited customizations and add-ons available for Camino. Or Google Chrome, which hasn't fully launched on the Mac yet but promises a big speed boost once it does.

Browsing is about more than speed. Firefox delivers a global community with a diverse array of needs and solutions, which is why it remains my preferred browser, even as Camino sprints by, unadorned.

[jrepenning]

Having trouble sorting this post out. Help?

I think you're saying that Safari is the fastest browser on the Mac. But you might be saying its speed advantage is only in artificial benchmarks, not real use. Unclear. Comment?

I think you're saying customizability of Safari is virtually nil, of Camino is better, but Firefox is best. But you might be saying that the potential for customization of Camino seems to rival Firefox, but the weak community (see below) means the actual, available customization doesn't approach 'Fox. The Safari point is well-taken here, but what was the Camino / Firefox message?

You're pretty clear in saying that the Firefox community is better, but it's not clear whether that's specifically because of the larger array of customizations produced, or because of a preference for communitarian products (or both, or an assumption that the two are inseparable). Can you clarify?

[saturdaysaint]

I prefer to run a plain jane web-browser that starts up and loads my homepage in a fraction of a second.

I've played with a few Firefox plug-ins (Adblock, Foxytunes, etc.) but none have really added significantly to the websurfing experience and none of the ones you mention seem like big value adds. When was the last time one of your frequently visited websites really overwhelmed you with obtrusive ads?

So Safari FTW.

[shusseina2]

I agree with your comments about plug-ins - the only one I use a lot is for traversing my history via the menu like in Safari. However, overall I prefer and use Firefox over Safari. The ability to quickly switch between search engines/sites such as Google, Wikipedia, Amazon and IMDb (using command+k and the arrow keys) saves a lot of time.

[-Oneota-]

This article reminds me of something that Tom Servo asked Mike Nelson once as they were exiting the theater after watching a particularly bad short film:

"What the hell was that *about*, anyway?"

[Ken_Saunders]

LMAO!

[xim1970]

But really, Matt, couldn't Camino be better optimized for extensions eventually? It's a new "sort" of browser. I'm using Chrome myself, but I only dumped FF because I installed a few too many extensions, and it slowed my (admittedly limited) system to a crawl (768MB RAM, 600MHz processor)...frankly, I didn't use many of the extensions anyway. Chrome could possibly go the route of FF, but Chrome (as the newest browser) works just fine now, if I don't get greedy with upcoming extensions. Still think FF is better than IE, but Chrome is better than FF (without any extensions).

[toosday]

I had to leave Safari for Mac after version 4 pretty much imploded on itself. I hear the updates have made it better, but the total lack of customization is frustrating. And all I want to be able to do is simply change the default search engine, that's all. (And the Safari plug-ins Glims and Inquisitor are overkill).

As slow as Firefox may be comparatively, you are right: The community makes it great. My PDFs operate like Safari. The Dictionary app is handled like Safari. And I can easily change my default search engine.

[OS11]

Camino is the bright light of the original Web coupled with the culture of the original Macintosh.

Forever live the independent spirit of Camino!

[ArtInvent]

This is really my gripe with Chrome. It's extremely fast, especially beta 4, and that actually goes a long long way. I've been a Firefox user but in the last couple of weeks use Chrome more and more. The lack of extensions really boils down to a couple oft-cited omissions - an ad blocker and a flash blocker. I use about 6-8 other extensions but really none of them are deal breakers. Maybe Xmarks to sync your bookmarks between different machines.

So I'm not convinced how much the 'lack of community' really affects these problems. Plugins will probably be enable fully soon enough on all these browsers, or they can simply do what Firefox and IE did with pop-up blockers, and build them in.

On the other hand, if Firefox can close the speed gap, I'd be back there in a NY minute.

[internet-redstar]

Here you can find the Chrome Beta.
It's very stable (surfing full time with it).
And faster than light! ;-)

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac

[kelmon]

It should be noted that Camino is a "proper" Mac application and not a cross-platform application like Firefox. Given this it behaves just like other Mac applications and supports system-wide services, like storing your passwords in the Keychain. Personally, I could not give two-hoots about Firefox Extensions as I have never seen any point in them.

[DanKnight58]

I've been using Camino for years - posting this from Camino 2.0b4. Why? Because it runs quickly, loads quickly, renders pages well, and just feels right. Firefox loads slow as it checks itself and any add-ons for updates. The plug-ins are nice, but Camino already has ad blocking. The only benefit FF has over Camino is that Camino will not track multiple IDs/passwords for the same site. As for Safari, after living with Camino as my default browser, Safari just doesn't feel right.

BTW, you can download G3, G4, G4, and Intel-optimized builds of Camino and FF - see http://lowendmac.com/tech/optimized-builds.html

Dan Knight, LowEndMac.com

[stonetownmike]

In a way, Camino is ALL community. Its developers are unpaid volunteers who reply to -- and sometimes debate -- bug reports, comments and requests on its very active forum. In addition to features shared by "modern" browsers -- such as full-page zoom -- it includes some great innovations, such as the ability to bookmark tab groups and a tab overview, which displays a thumbnail grid of all tabs in the current window. Like Firefox, many of its features can be fine-tuned through hidden preferences. In general, however, its sworn enemy is bloat -- putting it totally in the opposite camp from Firefox and Opera. Camino is a lean, clean, lightning-fast browser, designed specifically for the Mac. For me, it's unbeatable.

[rampancy]

"Unfortunately, both Safari and Camino fall incredibly short against Firefox because both are heavy on speed and light on community."

With all due respect, Matt, I think you simply don't know what you're talking about. First, as stonetownmike pointed out, Camino is ALL community. Camino first started out as Chimera, originally a tech demo started by Mike Pinkerton (one of the original Mozilla devs and now working on Mac Chrome) and Dave Hyatt (project head for WebKit) - when it was developed into a full browser project, it had the support of AOL/Mozilla, but had support for it cut off in 2003 at the same time Apple released Safari - suddenly and without warning (they even had pressed CDs ready for distribution at Macworld that year). Ever since, it's been purely community driven and developed, without any financial or corporate support from the Mozilla Foundation, unlike Firefox.

Second, for people who constantly cry out for Camino gaining compatibility with Firefox extensions, the reason why that will likely never happen is because Camino and Firefox have two very different design philosophies. Camino was designed from the ground up to be a Gecko-based browser by Mac users, for Mac users, leveraging Mac-native APIs and a Mac-native UI design. In contrast, Firefox uses Mozilla's XUL for its UI - it's a cross-platform system that by design, was never intended to tightly adhere to the UI conventions of any one platform; they even said so themselves in Firefox's developer documentation. That's why to this day, Firefox's UI has never had a standard Mac interface; many keyboard shortcuts are still non-standard, for instance. It's XUL which allows Firefox to use extensions; if Camino adopted a similar system it would be antithetical to the Camino Project's goals to develop a browser specfically tailored for the needs of Mac users.

This isn't arcane knowledge, either - anyone could glean this by searching on Google, or asking around the forums at Mozillazine. Frankly, I'm sick and tired of Firefox fanbois spreading baseless FUD about Camino. Much of the work they've done has also contributed to Firefox as well.

Oh, and for anyone who likes to live on the cutting edge, Chris Latko has some very nice optimized Intel-only builds of the Camino 2.1 betas here: http://www.latko.org/2009/08/09/intel-optimized-camino-2-1/

[jlking3]

I used Camino for almost a year and really enjoyed the experience. I had no need for a lot of extensive customization, and Camino did what I needed without feeling like it was slowing down my G4 Mini. I then moved to the nightly updates of Firefox that were optimized for my processor and never looked back until I was forced to trade in a MacBook Pro for an entry-level Acer. Now I use Flock and cannot wait for the time I get a MacBook.