Freeware

Camino: Like Firefox Without the Great Features

By EAN ⋅ August 20, 2007 ⋅  Email this Post ⋅  Print this Post ⋅ Post a Comment

Developer: The Camino Project
Version: 1.5.1
Price: Free (Open Source)
Download Camino Here.

Mac OSX is certainly not short on internet browsers. There must be at least ten or so to choose from. But why? Why would someone need to many different web browsers? Isn’t one, two, or three enough? Even as a web developer you wouldn’t need ten browsers - so why are there so damn many for the Mac? To make matters worse, many of the browsers are simply rehashes of popular rendering engines that have a new GUI to make them look more “Mac-like”. Unfortunately, that is the category that Camino falls into - stylish without any real substantial improvements over Firefox.

But before we get into the big problems with Camino, let’s praise it a bit for some things that it does right. To start with, Camino is attractive - far more so than Firefox [review]. It just looks like it belongs with the Mac. Hell, it looks like it goes with my Apple better than Safari does. The slick interface, the gorgeous icons, everything just exudes style. That’s a far cry from Firefox which is downright ugly in it’s default configuration on the Mac.

Another big benefit for Camino is it’s speed. Snappy and lightweight - the way a browser should be. Tabs open quickly, the bookmarks pane opens in an instant, and I don’t have to worry about it soaking up a ton of resources even with ten, twenty, thirty, or more tabs open at once. Always good to see a program in the world of bloatware that still tries to slim itself down.

Aside from the style and the size, Camino also has a couple of other cool features that are popping up in other browsers. The spell check feature is nice to see, and session saving is a really huge benefit. There have been far too many times that I’ve lost a bunch of open sites thanks to a crash and session saving really pulls through for me. Also, Camino is built on Mozilla’s Gecko layout (rendering) engine, so pages open quickly and look their best. Some other nifty features include pop-up blocking and easy to use RSS subscriptions. Best of all, Camino is also open source.

Now for some of Camino’s problems. There is not a single feature listed above that does not already exist in Firefox - another browser that uses Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine. Now, if both were web browsers that were only designed for the Mac, that wouldn’t be a problem because you’d have people working equally as hard on both products. However, Firefox is multi-platform AND open source - so there are tons of would-be developers working with Firefox in conjunction with Windows, OSX, and Linux. This means that problems get worked out more quickly, I can use the same browser no matter which platform I’m currently putting around on, and there are more add-ons, extensions, and other goodies for Firefox.

Speaking of extensions, there are none available for Camino. That’s right, all of those cool plug-ins that you and I have gotten so used to on Firefox are totally nonexistent on Camino - and that’s a real shame. To be honest, I would choose Camino over Firefox on my Mac if it had support for all of the Mozilla extensions. But at this point, not having the extensions that I use on a daily basis - like DownThemAll [review] and Mouse Gestures [review], to name a couple, is a huge disappointment to me.

So there you have it, Camino is a fancy looking Firefox without all of the cool features. It’s fast, it looks good, it’s got a couple of handy tools built in - but that’s where it ends. There is no ability to expand on the program, you can’t really make it your own like you can with some of the other browsers out there. I really want to like it - but the developers need to introduce extension support before I will ever be able to recommend Camino.

Try Camino for Yourself.

- Eric Norton

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