People who have been following me for awhile know that until recent months, I was notorious for always moving all over the place, particularly in the realm of chat clients and web browsers. I’ve already viewed the chat client that I’ve settled on, and for this review, I want to focus on my web browser selection.

Now, web browsers are no easy topic to talk about. Essentially, web browsers are like politics. Just like most everyone has their own political beliefs, most everyone has their own favorite web browser. And of course there’s the group that just doesn’t like any of the politics but still picks a side for the heck of it, just like there’s the group that just doesn’t like any of the web browser selections out there but still picks a side for the heck of it. Either way, it’s a debate that can pit even the closest of friends up against each other.

For the longest time, I’ve been one of the latter group: someone who had something to complain about for every web browser, which is why I kept changing browsers every few months. Now, my colleagues Robert and Larry on PreviewCast are die-hard Safari fans, which has prompted some of our infamous browser wars on the show, and which also prompted a web browser bet around the 2006 Tour de Peninsula ride that I managed to survive. I’ve tried all the web browsers, haven given a few months of my life each to Safari, Firefox, OmniWeb, and also a few minutes each to Flock and Opera, until settling a few months ago with Camino, which I am still using today.

Camino is a really under-appreciated web browser that’s produced by the Mozilla Foundation, but it’s 100% open source. As a big believer in open source software, that’s a big plus for me. The browser is based on the Gecko rendering engine, the same engine behind web browser heavyweight Firefox, however the browser is a full-on Cocoa application, meaning that it’s Mac OS X only and it takes advantage of all of the rich features and interface fluidity (if that’s even a word) of Mac OS X. Personally, I prefer the Gecko rendering engine over Apple’s WebKit (which Safari is based on) because Gecko tends to be faster, and is definitely more accurate. In particular, Gecko knows how to properly load and render the application/xhtml+xml MIME type, which means that valid XHTML documents served from this MIME type can load through the faster XML parser instead of the slower HTML parser. WebKit just serves everything through HTML, which is slower because it’s less precise. Gecko also has more improved JavaScript support, and can handle certain JavaScript situations that WebKit can’t seem to handle correctly.

But that’s a bunch of technical stuff that most users won’t care about. What they should care about is the usability and the features behind Camino. Stacked next to Safari, both of them are Cocoa applications, which means that they run a lot faster and cleaner than applications like Firefox, which is mostly a Carbon port of a Windows application (although rumor has it that Firefox 3 may make improvements in this department soon). However, Camino has some features which even Safari can’t match up to, and they’re features that make the deal-clincher for me.

Camino doesn’t have the brushed metal interface, which means it’s a bit better on the eyes than Safari is (although when Leopard comes out, they’ll probably be fairly indistinguishable). Camino doesn’t include a built-in feed reader like the one that Apple so highly touted for the OS X Tiger release, but rather understands that if you’re going to look at a newsfeed, you’re going to do it in a proper feed reader or online application instead of viewing it within the web browser. Safari also allows you to set a default feed reader to open feeds in instead of Safari’s RSS view, however Camino actually allows you to pick a feed reader when you subscribe, so you can subscribe to different feeds in different places, if you so choose. Plus, it uses the real feed icon instead of Apple’s stupid little “RSS” thing. Yes, standards are VERY important to me.

One of Safari’s limitations is its search box, and unfortunately Camino isn’t much better. By default, Safari only offers Google search (though there are rumors that Yahoo! search may show up soon). Camino only adds on a Google Images option and a Google Search This Site option, which is a shame, considering that Mozilla already has a search engine plugin capability for Firefox. Camino does not have Safari’s Recent Searches menu, or SnapBack (who the heck uses that anyway?), and Inquisitor doesn’t work with Camino, although it used to. *shrug*

However, Camino does contain a number of preferences that are missing in Safari, even the current 3.0 beta. If you’re the kind that needs to be able to read sites a consistent way, Camino allows you to set default colors for text, background, and links, as well as setting default fonts. Although Safari does allow you to set CSS defaults, it simply prompts you to upload a CSS stylesheet, which makes the option completely inaccessible to the average person who isn’t a CSS-whiz. One of the interesting things that Camino does is that it shares the same Keychain as Safari for forms and passwords, so that any forms or passwords that you’ve autosaved in Safari will be accessible automatically in Camino, and vice-versa.

One of my favorite features of Camino, one that I’m sure that Apple is going to have to put in Safari soon, is dubbed on Camino’s website as “single window mode”. Here’s the idea: web browsers now have this cool thing called “tabbed browsing” which lets you have multiple webpages open in a single window at once. Wouldn’t it be a great idea then to force all links to open in new tabs, so that you never have to have more than one browser window open again? Camino has the ability for you to say that links opened with Command-Click, links opened by other applications, and/or links that would open in new windows be forced to open in new tabs within the same window. As someone who personally likes to have his browser window take up the entire screen, I really appreciate having this feature and find it invaluable. It is the #1 reason I use Camino over Safari. However, Camino doesn’t have the draggable tabs that Safari 3 has, although that will probably show up in a future Camino release. Camino also has session archiving, which means that when you quit Camino and reopen, it can reload all of the pages that you were viewing when you quit. I leave this feature off personally, but if Camino crashes for some reason (which doesn’t happen too often), the ability to restore pages that were open is quite helpful. Firefox 2 also has this feature, and I’d imagine that Cupertino would add this to Safari soon. I also appreciate that Camino takes advantage of favicons a lot more, showing them off in the tab bar and in the favorites bar alongside the name, which makes those buttons a lot more recognizable when clicking on them.

Camino has a fairly simple Downloads window that’s kind of similar to Safari’s (and is much better than Firefox’s), although many Safari lovers will miss Safari’s built-in file decompressor, which would automatically unzip downloads or open disk images. Dashboard widgets don’t open automatically either, you have to double-click them in Finder to open them. However, I personally like having the zip file stay there, so this is fine with me. Camino also doesn’t limit its downloads window to the most recent 20 downloads like Safari does. It also provides a toolbar which provides many of the same functions as Safari’s rollover buttons, and I think that most users could get accustomed to Camino’s downloads window quickly.

And finally, Camino offers a lot of control over various web features. While Safari allows you to toggle plugins, Java, and Javascript, Camino also allows you to toggle the use of Flash animations. Camino also features the ability to block web advertisements and banner ads (why oh why doesn’t Safari have this feature?), and I’d say that this blocker is about 95% accurate in blocking these. It also blocks them well, often I won’t even know that they even existed. Camino can also scale images to fit within the content area, and can be set to play image animations only once. There’s also an option which lets you prevent sites from changing, moving, or resizing windows (which some sites do). It also has a very nice pop-up blocker–when a site tries to load a pop-up, Camino will display a thin bar along the top of the webpage notifying you of the pop-up allowing you to allow the pop-up to show up or ignore it just that once, along with options to always or never allow pop-ups from that website. To me, this beats Safari, which gives you no notification whatsoever of blocked popups, because sometimes there are legitimate pop-ups that you want to know about.

In conclusion, Camino is a stellar Mac OS X web browser which offers a number of features that are unmatched by Safari, and of which I’m sure Apple will probably pay attention to soon. Undoubtedly, Safari does have some features that Camino will probably get soon as well, such as the draggable tabs and the nicer search-within-a-page interface, but Safari users may very well want to give Camino a try, as the latest 1.5 release has advanced it to become a very mature and competitive browser. As for Mac users who are using Firefox, if you don’t have any themes that you’re in love with or plugins that you just _have_ to have*, check out Camino for a much cleaner and more Mac-like interface for the same rendering engine that you’ve come to know and love.

Final Rating:

* There is also an unofficial directory of Camino plugins and themes that you can find on the PimpMyCamino website.

Tags: browsers, Gecko, open source, review, Software, web browsing, WebKit