Friday, March 07, 2008

I'm back to Camino

I used Camino years ago -- it still runs on an ancient 10.3.9 iBook of ours and it's highlighted from days of old on my legacy web pages.

Eventually I switched to Firefox for OS X. I use it on XP, and for a while it was the best choice for working with Google's products and the general web alike.

Lately, however, Firefox has been pretty lousy on OS X. So I tried Safari, it seemed at first to work with Google stuff.

Alas, no way Safari. I got tired of pasting text into a rich-text field and having it appear in outside of the field borders. It's a mess. Safari (beta) is doing things that it shouldn't ever do - no matter how buggy the JavaScript.

OmniWeb is based on WebKit, so I didn't bother trying it (that was my original OS X browser, before Safari came out). That left Camino; it's been very recently updated (Feb 2008).

I've been using Camino again for a week. It feels much faster than Firefox or even Safari, it seems to work better than Firefox with Google stuff, and, merciful Minerva, the damned keyboard shortcuts mostly work (cmd-I brings up "page info" rather than italicizing in the rich text editor, but cmd-c and cmd-v work).

So far Camino has been extremely well behaved. I've used it with Google Blogger, Documents, Spreadsheets, Calendar and Sites and it's worked with all of them.

Definitely worth a look.

Thanks Camino team. If you supported Amazon donations or Google checkout I'd send you some money! (Sorry, I don't do PayPal.)

Update 3/17/2008: Camino is giving me a few problems. It seems to miss clicks on occasion -- so I have to click twice for some items. Google expects Ctrl commands so the Cmd shortcuts aren't as useful as expected. Most of all I've been getting odd hangs using Google Calendar. Of course I can't say any other browser is better!

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