The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

While I haven't used Camino much, I think that it has much better overall integration with the OS than Firefox does (although Firefox 3 is much better than 2). Someone above mentioned Keychain integration, which is the big one - I think it has others as well, although I'm not sure off hand.

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"Ok... if Firefox is all Cocoa now... whats the point of Camino. "

But it's *not* "all Cocoa". Much of Firefox is done with XUL, Mozilla's own interface language:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/The_Joy_of_XUL

And Camino isn't all Cocoa, in any case (it uses some Carbon stuff as well). But Camino *is* all native. Firefox never was, still isn't, and never will be. It's a cross-platform app.

It just uses *more* Cocoa than it did. That's all.

Think Firefox is "all Cocoa"? Open its Preferences and click the "Advanced" tab. Look at the tabs "General, Network, Update, Encryption". The tabs aren't like that in a Cocoa app. Look at the tabs at the top of the Preferences in TextEdit. They're not like that, are they? Firefox doesn't even *look* like a Cocoa app. Similarly the title bar is the same color whether the app has focus or whether it doesn't. That's not true of native Cocoa (or Carbon) apps

Can you use the default keybindings that work in any Cocoa app in Firefox?

http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/System%20Bindings.html

No.

Have you got access to the Services menu? No. Can you get word-completion by hitting F5 after you begin typing a word in a text-field in Firefox, as you can in any Cocoa text-field. No, because those aren't Cocoa text-fields. Can you call the OS X dictionary by pressing Control+Command+D, as you can in any Cocoa app? No.

And so on, and so forth. ...

In fact, you can see the application isn't built entirely from Cocoa by looking in the package. Right-click on Firefox's icon in the Finder and choose "Show Package Contents". Now navigate to the directory called "Mac OS" and have a look. In any native app there will be an executable in there, and that's all. That's not true of Firefox. Compare what's in Mail.app in the "Mac OS" directory, for example.

"What's the point of Camino?" is a different question. I don't really know. Why would I want an alternative browser, even one that integrates better with the system than Firefox does, when Safari is now mature enough to cope with most sites and now ubiquitous enough that most sites take care to make sure they work with it?

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> A web browser shouldn't get to 300MB *coughcoughSafaricoughcough*

I thought this myth was dispelled ages ago. Browsers cache stuff. If you need the memory for something else, it will release it. Otherwise, there's no point letting your RAM sit around doing nothing.

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i still have this problem too, that was the one thing i wanted fixed in FF3.

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But that's not the problem- It gets out of hand, after 5 minutes, it gets to 200MB. There's no way one website caused Safari to cache over 150MB of data. And right now, with only Safari, my 3GB 10.5.3 Macbook is hovering at around 44% RAM usage.

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Can you provide an example site that crashes FF and not Camino... I'd be interested in seeing this first hand.

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FF3 RC2 on OS X has a nasty bug that causes crashes when certain plugins (Flash, Java) are loaded. This should go away in RC3.

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What does that mean for me as a user?

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Have you tried the latest release candidate (which is the subject of this post)? It is nearly as fast as Safari. I haven't used Camino since just after I switched to the Mac last summer, but its lack of drag and drop tabs prevented me from ever considering it. Firefox may not be completely Cocoa, nor will it ever be because of its cross-platform nature, but it is actually and finally a really good browser on the Mac. I still use Safari most of the time, but Firefox works just as well, especially if you install Grapple instead of the lame default theme.

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Spoken like someone who hasn't tried it since 2.0 was released.

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