Camino Browser Ready For Mac Prime Time.

Instead of Safari, or Firefox, or OmniWeb, or Opera, I’ve been using Camino as my main browser for a couple of weeks. Camino has arrived. Finally.

It was a long, slow cooking process and the results are spectaclar. Camino can be your full-time browser.

There’s no shortage of Mac browsers. Safari has matured. OmniWeb is loaded with features. Opera keeps updating to newer versions.

Open Source browsers have come of age, putting a dent in Microsoft’s monopoly. Firefox continues to gain market share with a fast, secure, customizable alternative.

On the Mac side of the fence, Firefox works well but looks, well, like Firefox; which is to say, Firefox on Mac often looks like Firefox on Windows, which is to say, Firefox looks like Windows.

Mac users rejoice. The same guts that makes Firefox an attractive alternative is available for Macs. Camino.

Just think of Camino as what Firefox on the Mac should be. Why? Because it is.

Camino looks like it belongs on your Mac, and it feels like it could replace Safari and you wouldn’t feel bad at all.

With the 1.0 release of Camino, the little browser that could has come a long, long way.

It seemed as if we were stuck on version .84 for twenty eleven years.

The latest Camino is ready for prime time and ready for Intel Macs; a universal binary that lets Camino run on PPC Macs and newer Intel-based Macs.

The tab bar has been modified to look better and work better at the same time. In some respects, Camino feels like Safari but with a platinum, plastic look.

Also new is a modified download manager. This one supports pause and resume and is notably faster.

Of course, there’s all the things you’ve come to love and expect about the browsing experience on the Mac. Pop up ad blocking. It’s a must have. I honestly don’t know how Windows users put up with that annoyance.

One thing I like better about Camino than Safari is Certificate Support. Bambi and I work with many different web sites and developers, most of who have secure areas and many write their own secure certificates.

Camino handles that annoyance with professionalism.

There’s also a JEF—Java Embedded Plugin—for better compatibility with the Java applets you’ll find here and there.

Better sukpport for CSS 2 and CSS 3 is included, as well as support for Javascript 1.6.

What a browser boils down to are basics and features and that sweet blend of the two. For the basics, we all want the same thing. Speed and stability.

Camino is based on the same HTML rendering engine as the speedy Firefox 1.5x, so it’s fast. Very fast.

Is Camino ready for prime time? Yes, I’m using it every day and I’m very pleased at the recent improvements.

Are there known issues and problems? Yes, a few. Windows Media Player. Surprised. Get Flip4Mac and dump the old Microsoft version.

I found a couple of odd behavior in text fields when entering text on a page that has Flash. That doesn’t happen often. The only thing I miss from Safari is RSS support. Firefox users might miss some extensions.

Give Camino a whirl. Click Here for the features page and the download link.