Mainly Macintosh

Upgraded to Camino web browser 2.0

Version 2.0 of the Camino web browser for the Macintosh has finally been released. I upgraded today.

There are many interesting features in Camino and some of them are expected to be added to Firefox in the near future. The inventor of Camino has joined Mozilla to work on Firefox.

For instance, Camino lets you look at your Bonjour devices. Also, it uses your Keychain to keep track of passwords rather than having its own separate place for keeping track of them. This is nice, as it is a pain for someone with a number of browsers if they all have separate places for saving passwords for web sites.

Camino lets you use the Dictionary that comes with the OS for spell checking.

Camino can block popups - including Flash popups - and block Flash animations. You can enable them for sites that you want to view them on. In a similar vein, Camino gives you phishing and malware protection too.

There is a public wiki for Camino that tells a lot about the project. The documentation for Camino is pretty good.

If you want to see the latest news on Camino, take a look at the Camino Blog.

One thing that Camino unfortunately lacks is tagging for bookmarks. Although it has a Bookmark Manager very similar to the one that Firefox has, it lacks the tagging feature that Firefox has been sporting for years.

Another thing it lacks is the Firefox Location Bar - also known as the Awesome Bar.

The web engine inside Camino is the same as the one inside Firefox. Camino 2.0 comes with Gecko 1.9. Camino is slightly behind in Firefox features from Firefox itself. Still, it is very modern with web standards compared to some web browsers.

If you like the Mac-integration features of Safari but hunger for a web engine like the one in Firefox more than the one in Safari, Camino is a nice browser to try.

If you want a WebKit based browser that has a similar engine to Safari but some different features, Google Chrome is supposed to have its first release (perhaps a beta) out in December 2009. Another WebKit based browser besides those two is OmniWeb.

The Mac gives you many choices of browsers to use when you surf the web. Today, Macintosh computers make up about ten percent of the personal computer market. Apple is almost unique in the personal computer industry as its sales and profits keep increasing.

Right now computers running the Windows operating system are in a slightly stagnant period, similar to what the Macintosh went through in the 1990's before they modernized their operating system by giving it a Unix core and more powerful developer tools. Apple open source projects seem to be paying off for the Mac too.

Labels: macintosh

posted by John Collins @ 4:24 PM