Who uses Camino?

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Camino is a browser for OS X which uses Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine in OS X’s Cocoa API. The advantage for Mac users is that it’s a little faster than Firefox, and it integrates better with the OS X desktop environment.

But I just can’t understand why anyone would use it.

The Gecko 1.8 engine is very good, but it’s not the most standards-compliant; both Safari/Webkit and Opera have overtaken it recently. Camino is fast, but noticeably faster than Safari and Opera? Not that I’ve seen.

Camino doesn’t have some of the features we take for granted from a modern browser; no RSS detection, for example. And it doesn’t have any extensibility at all, so Firefox has it beaten hands down on that score.

As for integration into the Cocoa API: Safari does that too, and is just as fast, and is more extensible, and has more features.

So it’s not the most standards-compliant, not the fastest, not the most extensible, and no more integrated into the OS X desktop than some other browsers; why would someone use it?

And that question’s not meant to be rhetorical; I’d genuinely like to know.

2 comments on
“Who uses Camino?”

  1. I am a webkit user myself, but I see the attraction of Camino. Though Safari is technically more standards compliant, it still has trouble with *many* websites, particularly those that are AJAX-reliant. Camino actually does have RSS detection in the most recent beta, and does have quite a few extensions (see pimpmycamino.com). I switch back and forth between them a fair bit, particularly when webkit’s crashing drives me nuts.

  2. Thanks, Chris; I didn’t know about pimpmycamino.com; with that, it suddenly becomes a lot more attractive.

    Peter Gasston [February 28th, 2007, 13:00]