After a several years in development, Camino has finally arrived. Camino is now a version 1.0 program and officially out of beta.

Camino is a Mac Web browser based on the Gecko/Mozilla rendering engine. But unlike its cross-platform sisters Firefox and SeaMonkey, Camino is built on and for Macs. And, yea, verily, it is good.

This baby is fast. Web browsers have been getting faster for the last year or so but this may be the fastest browser around. Period. Safari is fast. Firefox, once it opens, is fast. Opera and iCab are fast. Camino feels faster. It probably isn’t for all web pages but it sure feels that way.

While Camino doesn’t support Mozilla/Firefox XUL extensions, there is a range of extensions and apps available for extending Camino. First I highly recommend that you (if you haven’t already) install CamiScript and CamiTools. These provide plenty of extra punch, from Ad Blocking, Bookmark Syncing and theming, to site styles and advanced preferences. Visit Downloads/addons thread for Camino for more.

Also, Mozilla bookmarklets play nicely in Camino too, so that goes a long way to filling the gap left by the Web Developers extension. I still use Firefox for analyzing page design. I still use Safari when I need to copy entire pages into TextEdit, preserving (mostly) formatting and images. However, Camino is my default browser, giving me Gecko page rendering in a real OS X application. That’s important because Safari chokes on WordPress, which powers this blog, often spewing errors when I try to edit pages.

Is this the be all and end all of browsers? Not hardly. There are simply too many excellent Mac browsers now days, an embarrassment of riches, really. Camino is a match for Safari in features, with better ad blocking. It’s free. Give it a try.

Publisher: http://www.caminobrowser.org/

Camino runs on Mac OS X 10.2 or later

Ease of use: 4
Features: 3
Value for money: 5
Macness: 4
Recommended

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 at 10:16 pm and is filed under Browsers, Software Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.