Camino

Open source; $0

Current Version: 1.0.4 (March 8, 2007) / 1.6 (April 18, 2008)

Camino (formerly Chimera) is an interesting beast. Basically, it's a streamlined version of the Mozilla web browser for Mac OS X, but with a twist: the back-end of the program utilizes Mac OS X's UNIX layer (including the Berkeley Standard Distribution networking stack) for speed and stability, and the front end (the user interface) is programmed using Cocoa, Mac OS X's object oriented programming interface.

What's the point? Speed - blazing speed. Camino is generally as fast as any Windows browser at loading individual pages - and that's a real treat. Camino is only a browser (no mail and news capabilities), yet that adds to its elegance and efficiency. Because the core code is based upon Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, it behaves smoothly and maturely. As of version 1.0 and many, many years of development and "pre-1.0" status, it also has finally gained most of the preference-setting capabilities that users expect from a mature web browser (with some hidden preferences, to boot).

Version 1.6 is available for Mac OS X 10.3 and later, making many enhancements, including:

• Automatic software updates - Camino now checks for new releases automatically.
• Improved tabbed browsing - When more tabs are open than can be displayed in the tab bar, arrows appear at the right and left edges to allow scrolling the bar. As part of this change, the tab overflow menu has been replaced by a menu displaying all open tabs in the current window.
• Keychain compatibility - Camino can now store information in the Keychain for multiple accounts at the same site.
• Improved toolbar search - The search field in the toolbar now includes a simple editor that allows deleting, renaming, and reordering search engines. Camino now supports OpenSearch search engine plug-ins. New search engines can be added to the toolbar's search field by automatic discovery or by web pages that provide links to OpenSearch plug-ins.
• Streamlined Find interface - The Find panel has been replaced by a Find toolbar that appears near the bottom of the browser window.
• Enhanced AppleScript capabilities - AppleScripts can now refer to individual tabs and windows. It is now possible to add, open, and delete bookmarks via AppleScript. Camino now supports custom toolbar items written in AppleScript.
• Additional feed reader options - Camino can now pass feeds to certain web-based feed readers.
• User interface polish - Camino 1.6 includes a number of new toolbar icons and interface enhancements to fit more closely with the visual style of Mac OS X 10.5.

The release notes further explain the items that are new.

(Version 1.0.4 remains available for Mac OS X 10.2.)

Camino was the first Gecko-based browser to run natively on Intel-based Macs, and I recommend that users of these Macs take the program out for a spin to see how it performs.

Why don't I make Camino a Drew's Pick? Well, principally because I think it's still lacking in some of Firefox's key configurability and extensibility, and I feel that there are still a few rough edges in its performance (for instance, Caming sometimes slows down when loading multiple tabs at once, and at least some key speed optimizations that have made it into Firefox - such as smoother support for the "general.smoothScroll" preference - remain to be optimized in Camino). That said, I'm keeping an eye on it; stay tuned...