Monday, September 26, 2005

My New Browser: Camino

I can get a little obsessive about eBay, now and again, as well as Cars.com, Edmunds.com and Autotrader.com -- I end up with a whole little Mission Control of browser windows open when I'm car hunting. And when I'm doing that, I like to use the heck out of tabs in my browser window; command+click a link and it opens in a tab in the same window, preferrably in the background until I switch to it. That way I can keep clicking links (from, say, an eBay results page) and have their pages load in the background until I click over to a tab to check out the resulting auction entry or review.

Put simply, Safari chokes on this little plan. For some reason, opening tabs in Safari windows seems particularly resource intensive, and after I've got about 6 windows open, each with 5-7 tabs, it starts to crawl so much so that I'm waiting for mouse clicks, then I'm waiting for Expose to kick in and so on.

With Camino, I've had no trouble surfing multiple pages with multiple tabs and then switching, say, to a live online game of Texas Hold 'Em. Camino isn't bullet-proof -- it will slow down, too -- but no where near as quickly as Safari. It's also not as buggy as Firefox, in my experience, which tends to go down once every 18 hours or so.

Camino is Mozilla technology based on the Gecko engine, but it's Mac-only, meaning, perhaps, a better product if only because they're more focused than the Firefox team. True, it doesn't sport as many fun features as Safari (for instance, it appears to do nothing native with RSS), but it's sprightly, slim and it gives you that designed-for-a-Mac-and-therefore-just works kinda feeling.

3 comments:

hellfried said...

camino just crashed my g4 ibook. this happened while i was trying to stream 'the inside mac radio' program, no less.

hellfried said...

i guess i have to eat my words now. after trying camino for the last 24 hours, i am sticking to it. it is definitely faster than safari. thanks for the recommendation!
pass the pepper!

iTodd said...

I've noticed one sort of wiggy thing -- every once in a while if I get *deep* into some tabbed eBaying, I'll get a freeze out of Camino. It's not nearly as regular and as irritating as the one I get out of Safari, but it still fails to please. Sometimes, if I quit Mail, it seems to make Camino pop back to life. That doesn't even seem to make sense, so maybe it's true that (1) there's no relationship or (2) it's actually Mail that's hogging cycles that I'm attributing to other apps!