Camino Browser Mac

Low End Mac users are always looking for ways to get better performance out of their aging machines. Most of these machines are used for web browsing, and this is one of the areas that lower spec’d machines suffer in.

I constantly flit from browser to browser, checking out new ones and new versions of existing ones trying to get that little extra speed. Firefox is good, and TenFourFox (a PowerPC build of Firefox 4) is impressive, but I wanted something even better.

Step up Camino. Camino is an open-source, Mozilla-based OS X-only browser. One of the common complaints about Firefox is its lack of integration with the OS X. Camino was created by an offshoot of the Netscape team to prove that Gecko, Mozilla’s rendering engine, could be embedded in a Cocoa application. As a native OS X application, Camino integrates with the keychain and Bonjour just like Safari does.

Is an open-source Web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users. The Camino Project has worked to create a browser that is as functional and elegant as the computers it runs on. The Camino Web browser is powerful, secure, and ready to meet the needs of all users while remaining simple. Camino Web Browser is Best in Mac Universe November 18, 2008. Brendan Gibbons The Camino Project released its newest version for Mac OS-X in September 2008. Version 1.6.4 of this union of Mozilla and Macintosh offers a solid, Mac-compatible browsing experience with quick load times and crystal-clear renderings using the Gecko engine. It is a Mac OS X exclusive browser from the Mozilla team. I have used Camino on a number of systems, and the later versions (currently in beta stages) have been fabulous. Camino is a neat and tidy browser, and with most older Macs not supporting the higher resolutions of more modern Macs, screen space is more of an issue – and this slim. Camino is intended to be a simple, small and fast browser for Mac OS X. It is stable enough to use daytoday, but you may still encounter bugs.You should always keep backup copies of important data.

I have been following Camino for a number of years (since it was in beta), and it has developed in to a top class, reliable browser. Early versions suffered from sudden crashing and quitting, but since coming out of beta it has grown more and more stable. It is also one of the few browsers not to bloat over time or lose its streamlined edge.

Camino has a clean interface without huge icons or toolbars.

It may not be as fancy looking a Firefox nor have endless add-ons, but then again neither is Safari. Camino is clean looking without oversized icons or toolbars. Everything is just neat and tidy. It’s slimness is its strong point.

How Well Does It Work in the Real World?

I am using all these browsers on a ten-year-old 500 MHz Titanium PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. (Camino also supports OS X 10.4 Tiger.)

At 46.6 MB, Camino 2.0.7 is quite small compared to Firefox 3.6.16 at 52.8 MB, TenFourFox 4.0 at 54.7, and Safari 5.0.5 at a massive 114.7 MB. It loads within a few seconds and only a handful of bounces on the Dock.

Page loading times are very impressive, easily the fastest of these four browsers.

It’s multiple tabs whether Camino really takes the lead. I have been trawling eBay lately looking for a good deal on an iPhone 3G, opening tab after tab of auction listings. Firefox starts struggling after three tabs, TenFourFox after four, Safari after five, but I opened 11 tabs comfortably in Camino. Now that’s impressive!

Other than its speed and rendering power, why would you choose Camino over more well known, better supported browsers? Or, more to the point, why shouldn’t you chose another browser?

Other Browser Options

Google Chrome Download Free

I’ll tell you with a quick run down of popular browsers and their pros and cons.

Camino Browser Mac

Google Chrome

  • Pros: Lightning fast.
  • Cons: Still a work in progress, not available for PowerPC Macs (there is an unofficial Chromium port for PowerPC), uses WebKit rendering engine, which suffers the same flaws as Safari.

Safari

  • Pros: Tight integration with OS X and very fast.
  • Cons: Terrible at rendering pages properly, constant page drop, lack of text editing features in sites like eBay selling pages make it a no for me.

Firefox

  • Pros: Good all around browser, multiplatform, infinite possibilities with endless plugins and add-ons.
  • Cons: Very resource heavy, not ideal for low-end Macs, PowerPC support stopped at version 3.6, too many add-ons bloat this browser.

TenFourFox

  • Pros: Custom fork of Firefox 4 for PowerPC, optimized versions for G3, G4, or G5 Macs.
  • Cons: Not a full port of Firefox 4, support and future builds are hanging by a thread as Mozilla moves further and further away from PowerPC and older versions of OS X.

Internet Explorer

  • Pros: Tight integration with Windows. Once the de facto browser for Macs (pre-OS X and early OS X), it was good for its time. (Publisher’s note: Version 5.1.7 is no longer available from Microsoft, but you can download it here. It still works on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, but it looks incredibly dated and has very poor support for modern Web protocols. dk)
  • Cons: As with most Microsoft products, what was once trim and very good browser became a boat for bloat, with more features than most of us need or want. For Windows users, it has been losing market share for years, especially to Firefox and Chrome.

There seem to be hundreds of other browsers that just don’t cut it for me: Opera (current release version requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later on Intel hardware), Shiira (10.4), Stainless (10.5), Sunrise (10.5), iCab (10.3.9), and SeaMonkey (10.4), to name a few, all have their own pitfalls – either they are in early stages or they use the same WebKit engine that Safari does and fall in to the same traps as Safari.

Camino for the Low End

If you have a lower spec’d Mac and don’t care for endless plugins and want to get the fastest browsing experience you can, Camino is for you.

Being Mozilla-based leads to the question of whether Camino will continue to be developed for PowerPC Mac users, or will it be yet another great tool that goes the Intel-only route? If it does, then TenFourFox will be our only saviour. After that, who knows.

For now, enjoy Camino’s raw speed.

Publisher’s note: I’ve also been using Camino for years and appreciate the same things Simon does: It launches quickly, loads pages quickly, renders pages well, handles tabs very well, and is more Mac-like than other Mozilla-based browsers. It runs well on OS X 10.4 and 10.5 PowerPC Macs – and on Intel-based Macs. One pro Simon doesn’t mention: You can tab from field to field, which not all browsers support. And one con: Although Camino uses the keychain, it will only use one ID and password per site, so if you visit a site using multiple IDs (say Gmail), Camino will only remember one of your IDs. dk

Keywords: #camino #caminobrowser #macosx

Short link: http://goo.gl/1jSqxj

keyword: caminobrowser

Follow Simon Royal on Twitter or send him an Email.
Like what you have read? Send Simon a donation via Tip Jar.

keywords: #camino #alternative #browser #macosx#techspectrum #simonroyal

short link: http://goo.gl/FLR4XK

searchword: camino

Best Browser For Mac 10.6.8

Camino Browser Mac

Camino is a port of Netscape specifically to Mac OS X. It began in late 2001 when Mike Pinkerton and Vidur Apparao launched a proof-of-concept project to embed Netscape’s Gecko rendering engine in a Cocoa application. Cocoa is Apple’s native object-oriented application programming interface (API) for Mac OS X and is rooted in NeXTstep, which Apple acquired along with Steve Jobs at the end of 1996.

Dave Hyatt, one of the co-creators of Firefox (the next generation of Netscape), joined the team in early 2002 and built Chimera, a small, lightweight browser wrapper, around their work. A chimera is a mythological beast with parts taken from various animals, and the new browser was a hybrid of C++ and Objective-C, combining Netscape’s Gecko engine and other traditional Netscape bones and muscles under a Cocoa and Carbon skin. (Carbon was a programming environment that supported both the Classic Mac OS and OS X; Cocoa is OS X only.)

Camino Browser For Mac

Low End Mac probably looks just like this in your modern, up-to-date browser. But this is 5-year-old Camino, which was already outdated by the time of its last update.

It was fast. It started with the Netscape code that had been honed since 1994 and set it free to run like lightning on PowerPC hardware and Mac OS X. Other browsers used Cocoa as their rendering engine, but Gecko put Internet Explorer and OmniWeb (the first OS X browser) to shame.

Hyatt must have impressed the people at Apple because in mid-2002 Apple hired him to help develop Apple’s own browser, which eventually arrived as Safari. Undaunted by the loss, the small Chimera team continued to develop their browser in hopes of previewing it at the January 2003 Macworld Expo in San Francisco. Unfortunately, AOL, which owned Netscape at that time, pulled the rug from under them two days before the Expo.

A New Name

The team abandoned the Chimera name for legal reasons and adopted Camino, Spanish for road, as the new name for their browser. Camino 0.7 was available on March 3, 2003 and a testament to open source – the path Netscape chose for its future when it launched the Mozilla project that gave us Firefox.

Camino remained a “preview” project until February 14, 2006, when Camino 1.0 became a reality. This was the first Mozilla project released as a universal binary, software that can run natively on PowerPC and Intel Macs. This was mere weeks after the first Intel Macs had been launched.

Welcomed with Open Arms

The Mac Web welcomed Camino with open arms. Those of us who published on the Web and researched on the Web were always looking for the next great thing in browsers, and for the Mac community, Camino gave us the features of Firefox without its then-ugly user interface. Instead, we got something almost as pretty as Safari.

Compatible with Web Standards

There were intermediate versions, Camino 1.5 and 1.6, leading up to the release of Camino 2.0 in November 2009. This was the first version of Camino with movable tabs and the first to pass Acid2, an industry standard test of browser compatibility with web standards. Apple’s Safari browser was the first to pass Acid2, which it did in Oct. 2005. Opera, Konqueror (the open source browser Apple used when developing Safari), Firefox, and most other browsers followed in short order.

The Johnny-come-lately was the former bane of standards compliance, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Microsoft had always had its own way of doing things, standards be damned, and refused to make IE7 standards compliant because that would break all the Web pages designed for Microsoft’s “we are the standard” non-compliant browsers. Finally, in October 2009, IE8 arrived and passed Acid2 – five years behind Apple’s Safari.

Legacy Software

So why do I continue to use Camino on my Macs? For one simple reason: It is the best tool for opening all of the thousands of pages of legacy Low End Mac content so I can cut and paste it into WordPress. From there I can check and replace or delete broken links and run Grammarly to smooth out rough grammar, punctuation, and usage.

I try to squeeze in a few pages a day. We currently have 3,100 pages published in WordPress and about 5,000 still in HTML, so this is going to be a long process. Then again, there is some content – most of the weekly news roundups, for instance – that can be left behind. That could reduce the count by 1,000 or so.

As for working on the Web, Camino displays the Low End Mac homepage and content just fine. Pretty impressive for a browser that was discontinued almost five years ago and was already dated at the time.

If you’re looking for a fast browser, download Camino and give it a try!

Further Reading on Low End Mac

  • What Is the Best Browser for Leopard on Intel Macs?, Daniel Knight, 2016.04.14 – Camino 2.1 behind the times but fast
  • What Is the Best Leopard Browser for PowerPC Macs?, Daniel Knight, 2013.07.11 – Camino is fast but dated
  • TenFourFox Is the Hands Down Winner for OS X 10.4 Tiger, Daniel Knight, 2013.04.06 – praise for Camino’s speed, but it is dated
  • Camino, a Fast Alternative to Bloated Heavyweight Browsers, Simon Royal, 2011.04.19
  • The Future of Up-to-Date Browsers for PowerPC Macs, Charles W Moore, 2009.08.31
  • Is Camino Now the Best Browser for Older Macs?, Charles W. Moore, 2009.01.13
  • 9 Browsers for G3 and Older G4 Macs, Simon Royal, 2008.09.26 – Camino 1.6 wins
  • 11 Mac Browsers Compared, Simon Royal, 2008.09.03
  • 6 Extensions to Make Firefox Even Better, Leaman Crews, 2006.03.29 – the author uses Camino as his default browser
  • Camino: A Better Mac Browser than Safari or Firefox, Leaman Crews, 2006.01.25
  • Camino, Firefox, and Opera Reconsidered, Charles W. Moore, 2009.01.19 – Camino 1.6
  • Firefox, Camino, Opera, or OmniWeb: Which Is the Best Safari Alternative?, Michel Munger, 2005.07.27 – Camino 0.8

Further Reading Around the Mac Web

There was a lot more coverage of Camino on sites including Applelinks,

  • Camino Web Browser Features, Uses, Advantages and Disadvantages, Heba Soffar, 2017.07.13. We’re not the only ones to sing the praises of this discontinued browser, although the English in this article is fairly mangled.
  • RIP: Camino Browser For Mac Is Dead, Killian Bell, Cult of Mac, 2013.05.31
  • Camino Browser Project Discontinued After Ten Years, Lex Friedman, Macworld, 2013.05.31
  • Camino 2.0 Adds New Features to Speedy Mac-Centric Browser, Kevin Purdy, Life Hacker, 2009.11.19
  • Camino Web Browser Is Best in Mac Universe, Brendan Gibbons, Practical Ecommerce, 2008.11.18
  • Camino Browser Goes 1.0, Peter Cohen, Macworld, 2006.02.14

Chrome Browser For Mac Download

keywords: #camino #caminobrowser

short link: https://goo.gl/orRSzX