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June 26, 2007

internet

The fickle love of a browser user

Posted Jun. 26, ’07, 6:37 AM PT by Derik DeLong
Category | Internet

Camino I’ve been harboring a bit of a secret for the past couple weeks or so. I’ve gone back to using Camino. In the dark days of Mac OS X web browsing, Camino was a glimmer of hope that things would get better. It was my browser of choice until Safari came on the scene. I quickly migrated. Then, after realizing how many add-ons I used to make Safari livable and how much memory it was sucking up, I switched to OmniWeb (motivated by a great sale). OmniWeb was another favorite from the dark days.

However, it’s gotten stale as Firefox, Opera, Camino, and now even Safari (3.0 beta) have progressed at a much faster pace. Ventures into OmniWeb’s forums revealed a thread asking about OmniWeb 5.6. The recent beta Safari release spurred an extra desperate barrage of “where is OmniWeb 5.6?”. To be honest, given the speed gains of Safari, I started to feel the same way, being the final straw that prompted me to try Camino once again.

I’ve rediscovered a basic fact of my browsing behavior: I prefer simple, fast browsing. While I appreciate the extra features in the other browsers, I didn’t miss them enough for me to ignore the tiny RAM footprint and incredible speed of Camino. The one thing I was missing was bookmark syncing, but that was eased by a recommendation of the man, the legend, John Moltz. Bookit let me synchronize the bookmarks between all my browsers locally. That doesn’t directly solve my multiple Mac problem, but when used on all my Macs with .Mac bookmark syncing turned on, bookmark changes get propagated between machines using Safari as a bridge.

Omni is promising that fabled 5.6 update soon. I’ll try to be patient and revisit the browser, but I must be honest, I may not return.


8 Comments

Moe said:

Like you Derik, I have tried multiple browsers and I keep going back to Camino. the recent update is welcomed and the speed and stability is top notch. It's not a resource hog, its simple, yet pretty and it does all the great browsing you need. It is my browser of choice for both my macs (home desktop & Macbook Pro).

Cheers Mate!

June 26, 2007 6:56 AM
Tim Welch said:

I love Camino. Although Flock has been a bit nifty. Safari is just to quirky for me. Camino has just enough and is even better with 1.5.

I hate the bloat that comes with the addons for functionality. I just tend to bloat my del.icio.us account with links, save entries in bloglines and use as much as I can outside of the browser.

I prefer a fast experience versus the swiss army knife they tend to become.

June 26, 2007 8:19 AM
Dave-O said:

I'm confused. You don't need a lot of features, just speed; yet you cannot live with Safari without a bunch of plugins?

June 26, 2007 9:37 AM
Derik said:

I'll admit, that sounds contradictory. However, there are a few features I consider necessary. Really good live searching is one. Ad blocking capability of some sort. Better control over forcing new windows to open in tabs is another. Session saving and spellchecking round out my list. Sure, they're features, but at this point, I consider them core features of any browser.

June 26, 2007 12:28 PM
Dave-O said:

In other words, you need a lot of features, half of which are in Safari 3 (live search, session saving, spellchecking seems to be off for now, but it was in Safari 2 and they've already confirmed it's coming). Control over opening in new tabs? I'm not seeing any options in Firefox that don't also appear in Safari.

June 26, 2007 1:15 PM
Adam Goff said:

I agree with the writer in that I prefer a clean, simple, no nonsense browser which is why I prefer Safari as my everyday browser. I have yet to try Safari 3 for the simple reason that I hate betas. I'm not a developer and I don't pretend to be. There are usually enough bugs inherent in a final release so I certainly don't want to deal with the one inherent in beta releases.

While I primarily use Safari I do however keep two other browsers in my stable. After Safari I prefer Seamonkey, perhaps it's all out of a sense of nostalgia but part of me still likes the idea of the browser suite, plus it's built on tried and true technology and renders most pages accurately.

Then of course is my oldest, most wretched, most hated browser of all time - Internet Explorer. Even though I only use it 0.009% of the time and despite the fact that I must shower directly after I use it, the fact remains that there are still a few sites out there that do not play nice with anything other than IE.

June 26, 2007 1:31 PM
Kelmon said:

Camino is, again, my default browser at the moment. There are functions that I like in Safari (v2 or v3) that I wish were in Camino but then the same goes the other way and I just find Camino a better experience. If I had to add to a wish list for the browser then I ask for:

* A better way to add bookmarks, such as being able to drag an address to a folder rather than trying to find what I want from a drop-down list.

* Easier form auto-complete

* Safari/Firefox-style Find function

* Tab re-ordering

Add those and I think we have perfection. If Dave Watanabe can re-release Inquisitor for Camino again then that'd also be great (I have no idea why support was dropped).

June 26, 2007 11:46 PM
funkright said:

Ya, I have switched back to Camino as well.. Safari for me was starting to crash allot, but then again I do tend to open ALLOT of tabs at the same time and push abilities to the limit. To bad that Camitools isn't current though, liked that app..

June 27, 2007 7:15 AM

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