Camino hits 1.6
Camino, my preferred browser on the Mac, got updated to version 1.6 today. I’ve been using the 1.6 betas for a couple months and I’m very happy with both the recent improvements in 1.6 and the overall stability. Better Leopard GUI integration and automatic updating are my two favorite new features, but there are many more refinements.
Camino has been a favorite browser of mine for a while for a variety of reasons (it was one of the first browsers to have tabs), but in the current market I like the way it combines many of the strengths of Firefox with a true Mac application behaviors and GUI. John Gruber discusses many of these issues in his comparisons (part two) of Safari 3 and the Firefox 3 beta. These differences are significant enough that, though I use Firefox all day on Linux at work and as my default browser on my PC, they bother me when using Firefox on my Mac. Camino takes care of just every one of these ‘Mac behavior’ issues and looks great doing it.
Another big plus for Camino is built in annoyance blocking. Camino has settings to block web advertising and flash animations (two features I consider essential to modern browsers) built right in, while Safari and Firefox require hacks or plug-ins (respectively) to enable these kinds of features. Certainly, I do appreciate the huge library of Firefox plug-ins that are available (I use many of them with Firefox and wish these features were in Camino), but Camino always seems to have just enough features to squash any issues (and the features it does have work great). Safari has always lagged behind on the feature front and continues to do so today; its lack of official plug-in support is particularly hampering.
So downlaod the new Camino and give it a try.
April 18th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Firefox 3 blows away Firefox 2 and Camino when it comes to the important parts, page rendering speed, memory usage and open web standards support. But it seems Mac users are more concerned over UI and other fluff instead.
Camino 1.6 still uses the same old Gecko 1.8 engine as Firefox 2, so all the problems and slow, unresponsive feel is there, even if it’s a natively built Cocoa app.
April 18th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Certainly Firefox 3 has better standards support than the older Gecko engine used in FF2 and Camino. However, it’s hard to argue that this is an important part of any daily browsing experience since CSS 3 and the associated standards are so new that they aren’t used in anything but demo pages. Instead, most pages are built around the rendering capabilities of Gecko 1.8 in FF2 which Camino supports flawlessly.
As far a page rendering speed, I don’t notice any appreciable differences between FF2, FF3, Safari, or Camino. This may be different if you connect via a slower connection, but on the fat pipes I use at both work and, to a lesser extent, at home there is not a noticeable difference.
Your final point about memory usage is more of a dicey one. First of all, FF2 was a memory hog on all platforms. However, the memory issue was made more complex because many of the problems were attributed to sloppy code in the add-ons and plug-ins in Firefox. FF3 claims to fix many of the memory issues in its predecessor (and certainly it makes great strides in this area) but it remains to be seen if add-on and plug-in support drags this area of performance down again. On the other hand, I haven’t had too many problems with Camino being a hog in the long time that I’ve been using it. It certainly never feels slow and unresponsive as you claim.
Long term memory management, though still important in browsers, is less of an issue in the current generation of browsers in any case because they all have session support. So, if you notice slow performance after a few days, simply quit your browser and relaunch it. The program will remember all the tabs and windows you had open so, as long as you weren’t in the middle of filling out a form, you’ll be back right where you left off with a lower memory footprint. For me at least, this eliminates many of the memory usage concerns with any browser.
April 18th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Much of the CSS3 stuff hasn’t been finalized, Fx3 doesn’t implement much of it until the standards are finalized, probably Fx4 will support it fully. I use a broadband connection and even then, Fx3 is noticable faster and this is well documented by other bloggers on the net. Fx2 is obsolete and cannot compete with Fx3 at all. I didn’t bring up the Javascript performance benchmarks because everyone knows how much faster Fx3 is at that, and AJAX heavy pages which is the norm now.
Firefox 2 leaks memory badly and doesn’t release memory, even if you run it with zero add-ons/extensions installed. This is well documented, you can search on the Internet many articles and screenshots showing Fx2 using up to 1GB of RAM or even more because of the memory leaks after a few hours. With Firefox 3, this is non issue now.
http://blog.pavlov.net/2008/03/11/firefox-3-memory-usage/
April 18th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
I absolutely agree with you: Firefox 3 is significantly better at memory management and JavaScript performance than its predecessor.
That doesn’t mean that Camino leaks and doesn’t release memory to the same degree as FF2. In any case, I certainly will be looking forward to updates to Camino that add in FF3 features such as the new Gecko engine and better memory management.
However, for the time being, in a comparison on the Mac between Camino 1.6, Safari 3.1, and Firefox 3 Beta 5, I prefer Camino.