Caminante, no hay Camino... hay Firefox

I've been in and out of love with Camino ever since I switched to Mac OS X, but for all of its strong points I invariably I found myself drifting back to Mozilla, later Safari, now Firefox. Now that Camino has reached adulthood with version 1.0, I decided to give it another try. Initial impressions were good: the interface looks sleek and elegant, menus are uncluttered, the browser feels fast and it comes with preconfigured plug-ins for Java, Flash, Quicktime et al.

It's the Ecosystem, Stupid!

Nice as it is, after using it for the better part of a week I decided it didn't cut it as a Firefox replacement, for a few reasons:

1. Although Camino feels blazingly fast when you have only a few tabs open, CPU usage becomes excessive (50-60% on 1GHz PowerPC) when you have 2 or 3 of windows with 20-30 tabs each. You might diagnose me with ADD, but that's the way I usually work with Firefox, and Camino doesn't cut it for this kind of usage. Ever since I set browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers to 2 instead of -1, Firefox has been quite usable with a large ammount of tabs (I used the same tweak with Camino).
2. Setting aside performance issues, I find it unnecessarily constraining that when browsing with a 1024 wide window, Camino only shows the first 10 tabs, less than Safari's 12 tabs and much less than Firefox's 23 tabs (on OS X).
3. I bookmark groups of tabs all the time. Besides the fact that Camino discards the oh so handy "bookmark all tabs" Cmd-Shift-D shortcut, it commits the abominable sin of hiding the individual tabs inside an opaque group bookmark. Firefox approaches this problem elegantly by creating a bookmark folder with a bookmark for each open tab. These bookmarks can later be opened individually, or collectively using "Open in tabs".
4. Last but absolutely not the least, I miss my toys extensions. There are troubling signs that Firefox is following Emacs into a downward spiral that will lead to it becoming a kind of OS-within-the-OS, but while some of the extensions I use are not really that indispensable, at least half a dozen have become so ingrained that it feels unnecessarily crippling to do without them. Camino does have some kind of built-in ad-blocker, but it offers no compelling additional functionality compared to a plain-vanilla Firefox installation. The network effect works for Firefox as it did for other technologies in the past: suddenly the value lies as much in the extensibility of the technology as in the technology itself.

Camino is not a browser for power-users. It would be a great "uncomplicated" browser for Mac OS X if Safari didn't already exist. As it is, it seems like the niche it is aiming for is already taken.

2006-02-26 Update:
I sent an email to [email protected] detailing these four criticisms, and got a very swift and detailed response from Chris Lawson.

Apparently, issue #1 is due to a few known performance bugs related to javascript- and flash-heavy pages, where one single page can be enough to hog the CPU.

As for issue #2, the project's priority is to have tab titles remain readable. Chris tells me they already get a LOT of complaints saying that tab titles aren't readable enough, so it's unlikely this will change. To each his own, I suppose.

Regarding issue #3, Chris defends Camino by explaining that their bookmark groups are actually a superset of Firefox's bookmarks, and any bookmark group can be made into a regular bookmark folder. This is not a solution as far as I'm concerned, for two reasons: 1) You have to open the bookmark manager, right-click on the bookmark group, choose "Get Info" and deselect the "Tab Group" option, which is a bit cumbersome; 2) It doesn't seem to accomplish anything, other than change the bookmark's icon to that of a standard folder -- if you go to the bookmark menu, the bookmark folder remain's opaque, i.e. it's not a submenu that allows you to inspect individual bookmarks inside it.

Issue #4, extensibility, has already been partially addressed. Since Camino does not use XUL, direct compatibility with Firefox extensions is off the agenda, but there is already some kind of extension mechanism for Camino's Preferences panel. A little googling dug up a mozillaZine thread on Camino downloads, addons and themes.

Comments

[mendo henriques]

Cá estou. Sem qualquer sofisticação porque uso sem perceber - ainda bem - também passei para o Mozilla Firefox. MAis rápido tecnicamente e ideologidcamente anti-monopolista
mch

[che]

keria saber kem cant a versao feminina da musica "eu estou aqui" k aparece no novo anuncio do millenium bcp...kem souber pr fvr k m mande pro mail pq nao venho a est site mts vezes....brigado pla atençao...

[email protected]

[RBM]

Olá
1 que tudo aqui está um belo blog, faltam muitos como este.
outra coisa, também tenho curiosidade em saber quem canta e onde posso fazer o download da musica "eu estou aqui" versao feminina (questão colocada anteriormente)

Segue o meu mail: [email protected]

Continuaçao do bom blog ;-)