Camino Beta 2: First Thoughts

About a year ago, I was prepared to write off Camino. With Firefox updating its interface to make it more Mac-friendly and improving its performance across all OSes every day, I was wondering aloud why there was a market for another Mac Firefox, specifically one without plugins or themes.

Sure, being built on Cocoa gives Camino a natural speed and memory advantage over its brother, but the difference, over all, has been barely noticeable and certainly not enough to propose switching to a browser with fewer features.

Personally, I was thinking that it was time to take the project behind the shed and put it out of its misery. It filled a nice niche when Firefox was being a jerk to Mac users but now that we’ve kissed and made up Camino seemed to be a third wheel in a very sordid love triangle.

So imagine my surprise when I found out not only that Camino had released a new version, but that it was a beta of 2.0. I was skeptical, to put it modestly, but decided to give it a try. I felt that I owed it to the old girl since she had comforted me when Firefox had me wanting to hang myself.

I have to say though that the surprise is indeed a pleasant one and this version of Camino just might become a real challenger for Firefox, at least until Chrome is release for the Mac in a meaningful way.

What’s New

If you look through the release notes (linked above), you quickly see that most of the new features of the 2.0 release center around tab management. Whether it is drag and drop tag reordering, tab overview or a key board loop that now interacts with the tab bar, everything is centered around tabs.

That decision is sensible enough though. The 1.X branch of Camino was plagued with problems in tab management. The lack of tab reordering and effective extending of the tab bar made it unusable for even medium intensity surfers. If you opened up more than about eight tabs with 1.6, you were in for a double bag of hurt.

In that regard, 2.0 does address those issues quite well. Tab overflow is handled with a modest amount of sanity and drag and drop dabs works well, actually managing to surpass the usability Firefox brings to that feature.

Other than bringing sanity to the tab bar, there isn’t a lot new to Camino. It upgrades the engine to Gecko 1.9, for what that is worth, and adds full page zoom, which is useful for those who are visually impaired. All in all, cool features but not really the kind of things you expect in a new number release. Camino has been one of the worst at releasing 1.X version without an upgrade to 2 so I’m not exactly sure what made this one the release that had to be 2.0.

Still, it does fix a few issues that have become major gripes about the browser, so it is worth at least a serious look.

Kicking the Tires

When you pull up Camino you notice quickly that the new one looks just like the old one. Not a bad thing if you’re into green, blue and red buttons, but it would have been nice to have a new interface that didn’t look like it was from 95 or designed for kindergarteners. Still, it is functional and since you don’t spend much of your time looking at the buttons on your browser, unless you’re an idiot, it’s also forgivable.

The browser itself actually feels very solid. Even though it’s a beta, it feels much more stable than other “released” browsers. I’ve had no crashes or obvious bugs in my time using it, which is pretty amazing considering that even “stable” browsers usually show some wear and tear after about four hours with me pounding the keys.

Compared to the latest beta of Firefox, which I had been using full time, Camino 2.0 beta feels more stable and, surprisingly, faster. Where Firefox seems to beach ball my computer a few times per hour, Camino causes no such hang ups. Tabs open fast, changing between them is instant and RAM usage seems to hover between 120 and 175 MB at any given time, actually making it “cheaper” to run than Tweetdeck.

Granted, all of that is pretty amazing, but there are drawbacks to consider. It may be stable, fast and running a reliable engine, but that doesn’t mean its perfect, just almost.

Problems

What I don’t like about Camino is its near-complete lack of extendibility. Sure. There are ways to add icons and some extensions, but they are hacks and certainly not as clean or easy as add ons in Firefox. Furthermore, most add ons for Firefox are not available for Camino yet, though some important ones, such as ad blocking and Flash blocking, are built in.

If you’re the type of person that has a lot of Firefox extensions, Camino is going to feel very confining to you. Installing add ons and skins feels more open heart surgery than it does putting on a new set of clothes and, worse still, there is no guarantee that said add-ons will work with 2.0. Though that is true with any new release, at least with Firefox you can enable and disable extensions without blowing up your browser.

That being said, how much this impacts you will depend on your browser usage. “Power” users that depends heavily on specific extension have already become too addicted to Firefox to ever switch and probably wasted the time they’ve already spent reading this review. So, to those of you, my apologies and you can go home now.

To the rest of us mere mortals, Camino 2.0 is just a solid browser, not exceptional, but so perfectly mediocre that you can’t help but love it.

Conclusions

As I said, Camino is not and never has been for Firefox users snorting the cocaine of extensions. If you’re hooked on them and don’t think you could survive without your fix, you need both an intervention and to stay away from Camino.

If you can pry yourself away from your extensions, Camino 2.0 is an impressive browser. It moves fast, uses little RAM, is amazingly stable and uses what I feel is the best rendering engine. Personally, I think this is ideal for Safari users that want to switch to a Gecko-based browser but don’t need nor are they used to all of the bells and whistles that come with an extensions library.

However, Firefox users that might be willing to go through withdrawl and ween themselves off their extensions, will find Camino both a fast and capable browser and one that feels more bullet-proof than it’s brother.

Camino used to be the best Firefox for a Mac, thanks largely to Mozilla’s use of non-native code on their Mac releases, but now it is carving out a new niche as the “Safari/Firefox” hybrid for Mac. It’s a browser that has the simplicity and Mac-friendliness of Safari, but the engine and usability of Firefox.

It’s a nice niche and one I am fond of. It has become my default browser, at least until the new Firefox beta is released…