Does anyone remember Camino? I didn’t think so. There was a time when Mac-using Mozilla fans would use Camino (Originally called Chimera), but today’s climate is very different. WebKit-based browsers have taken a strong foothold, and there seems to be a thinning of the herd in terms of alternate browsers. “Team Gecko” seems to have moved much more of their focus on Firefox.
As the folks at Mozilla work on their Gecko rendering engine, it is clear that Firefox is their number one priority. That’s very understandable when you look at how popular it is. Being completely fair, Firefox has become much better at fitting in with Mac OS X. There was a time when the Firefox team wanted a standard look and feel on every platform, and that clearly ended up being the wrong path. During that time, Camino was a better experience on the Mac when compared to Firefox. As it stands now, there is much less of a gap.
One of the biggest selling points of Firefox has been their add-ons. While you can extend the functionality of Camino, it isn’t truly compatible with the Firefox methodology. Along with that, it just doesn’t receive the same love and attention the bigger products like Thunderbird get. The last saving grace for Camino, in my eyes, is the integration with OS X’s Keychain password manager. Being able to use one single password manager on your computer is wonderful, and it is only a matter of time until the Firefox team sees that.
Do you use Camino? If so, please comment on this post, and let us know why you remain loyal to a back-burner browser. Maybe you know something that the rest of us don’t.
July 19th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
I use Camino still sometimes, when Firefox behaves strange or sluggish and I have to quickly do something in WordPress. For some reason unknown to me WordPress behaves better in Gecko- than in WebKit-browsers.
July 19th, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Interesting. I use Safari every day, and I haven’t run into any WordPress issues. Is it just a speed issue?
July 22nd, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Same. I use Safari every day and never had any problems with WP
July 19th, 2010 at 6:14 pm
Sometimes – not always! – the little pop-up-windows like “add/edit link” or “insert/edit picture” stay empty or show garbled or incomplete content. Maybe it´s caused by a plugin, I don´t know. I just stop what I do in Safari, save it, start Firefox and go on.
Some four or six years ago I was part of the Camino-nightly-betatesting bunch. It was a good time, Camino or it´s forerunner (I forgot what it was called before it was renamed Camino) was so much better on my Pismo and dual G4 867 than Firefox and it was the first browser I used that had tabs.
I still keep it updated to the last stable version, just in case ;-) .
July 20th, 2010 at 12:33 am
One of the first things I did when I got my Mac was download Firefox, but I didn’t like it’s Windows feel (this was before FF3). I found Camino and used it religiously until someone convinced me that Safari 4 was better (or perhaps it was released later?).
I’ve been a diehard Webkit user ever since.