Camino 1.1 Alpha 1

I used to use Camino, but I switched to Safari, not because of any event or trigger, but because I got fed up of Camino's lack of smooth scrolling. It doesn't matter with a normal mouse wheel, which clicks, but when using a mighty mouse or 2 finger scrolling on the trackpad, it goes in 1-line increments. Sorry, but until Camino gets it, I'm not in. Firefox claims to have smooth scrolling, but it's not nearly as fluid as Safari or other apps.

I have an old g3 imac in our spare bedroom and my favorite reason for using camino is the optimized builds. You can download G3,G4, or Intel optimized builds of the browser and it does make a difference. There is no noticibly difference browsing the web on the G3 or my other macs (sadly, no Intel based macs yet :( ). Firefox is barely useable and almost chokes the little guy out of memory.

Chris

Camino is NOT just a cocoa version of Firefox. And, no Camino is not going away.

Camino is specifically developed as a Mac browser, that does things right.

"The Camino Project has worked to create a browser that is as functional and elegant as the computers it runs on. The Camino web browser is powerful, secure, and ready to meet the needs of all users while remaining simple and elegant in its design." - caminobrowser.org

Note the "simple" in that statement. The developers go out of their way to not bloat the browser. And, if you do want to make some tweaks, I suggest you go to pimpmycamino.com, especially taking a look at camitools.

I used to use Camino a lot but but it tends to load pages a little slower than some of the others... Lately i've been using Omniweb... It isn't free but it loads pages pretty quickly and uses the latest version of webkit. My main gripe with it is that it is a BEAR when it comes to memory - it uses so much! The only other complaint I have is that the tab-bar stays on the side with mini-previews of each tab. The feature is really cool and i'd use it if I had a monitor but on my 15" mbp I want all the real-estate I can get!

Camino is a great browser, but until it comes with a Javascript debugger/console, I'm going to remain barish towards it.

I'll tell you one simple reason I use Camino over Firefox on my machine: I can view movie trailers on Apple's Quicktime website. For whatever reason, the little blue buttons you click on to choose what size trailer you wish to view just don't show up in Firefox, and there's nowhere to click in their place to launch the trailer. In Camino, the buttons show up without a problem.

I do miss Firefox's search box being able to search through different websites other than Google, though.

As for me, I could never stop wondering why bother with using a Gecko-based browser under OSX. They just don't cut it; they work horribly with fonts and even behave themselves differently than their Linux/Windows versions do. Something to back up my words? Consider http://zoi.ru/files/20061020/drive_camino.jpg and http://zoi.ru/files/20061020/drive_safari.jpg for starters.

Camino still sucks.

"Free" isnt automatically better, despite what some of the Open Source advocates think.

Trevis,

The answer would be that Camino was written specifically for the platform. Firefox is intended to be cross-platform, a strategy which makes sense for the Mozilla Foundation, since they want to be available on as many platforms as possible, and that's the easiest way to do it. But Camino was started as an independent project by people who wanted something written specifically for OS X. What this means is that not only do you get a more appropriate look and feel, but you get better integration with the OS. For example, Camino can make use of the keychain, the Services Menu, and the Address Book, as well as that system-wide spellchecking that was mentioned. Much of that could perhaps be done with a little more trouble with a program that was not so-to-speak fully native, but it's doubtful if some of it ever would be. But that's not really the point of a cross-platform app. - I think that Firefox (and Thunderbird, and so on) are *intended* to be the same on whatever platform you find them.

The value of Camino over Mozilla's more official offering, then, is that people who want that level of integration with the OS will prefer it.

That said, I don't use either: I prefer to use Safari myself, anyway. :-)

I thought Alpha releases were after Beta? Shows how much I know.