Sunny Side Up

I got asked over email why I prefer Camino over Safari and as I was typing out the reply, it got a bit longer than I thought so I figured might as well post it here.

The whole thing started when I wanted to see what all the tabbed browsing fuss on Mozilla was about, back in late 2001 or so. Internet Explorer had been my main browser since Mac OS 8 while Netscape looked like shit (still does).

Tried out Mozilla, didn't like it, tried out Opera, looked like crap, OmniWeb wanted me to pay so I stumbled upon a little OS X project called Chimera. Started interchanging between it, Safari public preview and IE for a while until Apple released Panther in '04 which had tabbed browsing in Safari.

After a while, Chimera/Camino wasn't going anywhere so I dropped it. Turns out one of the developers defected to Apple in '02 and headed the Safari team. The Chimera group thought the battle was over and largely dropped Camino until Mike Pinkerton, the current lead dev, thought it was worth a revival in '03.

I didn't touch Camino again until late '04. There was nothing wrong with Safari in Panther but I wanted something more flexible. Using Safari just seemed so conformist but I stuck through it while Camino was largely in a coma.

Conformist? Yeah, I know, using IE is conformist because everyone who doesn't know better is using it but there was something about Safari that just didn't sit well with me. Wasn't expandable enough I suppose, which was why I then headed over to Firefox.

Even until now, the ported nature of Firefox still consistently rears its ugly head but extensions sort of won me over, so for while, it was Safari and Firefox with Camino getting a look in every once in a while. In that order.

The development versions of Camino early this year adopted a Safari-style bookmarks panel instead of the godforsaken drawer it's been using since 0.6. Until Camino ditched the drawer for a bookmarks panel (as of the later 0.8+ nightlies), I was still using Safari and Firefox mainly.

At one point I had enough with Firefox being such a poser so I pushed it aside for Camino just as development hit full throttle. Being an open source project with an open community, it gave me a peek at the development process and even interact with some of the people involved in it.

And then there's the whole Safari being too obscure to be fully supported by the web. With Firefox in top gear, sites began opening up to "the other browser" and since Camino shares the same core engine as Firefox, whenever Fx gets the nod, Camino is in, like Flynn, well, mostly anyway.

Next was the limited nature of Safari. It didn't have the community support for extensions and add-ons as Camino did at the time and having multiple search engines in the search bar was important to me so Safari failed that test.

Bookmark keywords also won me over. You can assign a keyword to a bookmark so instead of looking for the bookmark in the bookmarks bar or the bookmarks menu, you just type the keyword you assign to it. Say I wanna go to applegeeks forum. I just enter agf in the address bar, boom, it takes me there. I wanna read Real Life Comics, I just enter rlc, boom, I'm there.

Typing is faster than mousing around because I keep both hands on the keyboard. A problem with Camino is that once I tab from the address bar to the search bar and then to the content area, the focus stays there, it doesn't go back to the toolbar. I hope they fix that before it hits 1.0.

Now there's pimpmysafari.com which lists all the Safari add-ons that you can find but many of them are shareware, demoes, commercial, or just don't have the options I want the way I want it. Camino has CamiTools, a collection of preference panes full of additional options.

Basically the way I see it, Safari is my safe option. If anything goes wrong with Camino, I fire up Safari. It's mainly about trying what's different and being on the edge.

While the official Camino release is currently still at 0.8.4, they released Camino 1.0a1 not too long ago, a preview of what Camino 1.0 will look like. It doesn't have RSS like Safari 2.0 in Tiger but it's a lot more mature and developed than Firefox 1.5b2.


P.S: As for why I don't use Firefox much, it's a shitty Mac OS X app. It may be a great Windows app and I keep telling all you poor Windows users to ditch IE for Firefox but it's just not OS X enough for me because it doesn't do things like an OS X program should.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11, 2005 at 2:11 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.