Saturday, September 23, 2006

Replacing Safari

Since resolving that Safari must perish. I'm been playing with alternative browsers. The acid test, of course, is Google. OmniWeb actually shows the RTF text controls in Gmail, but they don't work. Spreadsheets rejects OW immediately.

Of course Firefox 1.5 works. So does Camino, the Cocoa Gecko browser. Camino doesn't have all the FF extensions I use (no Google toolbar, no Google bookmark synchronization, etc), but it does have features of its own:
Camino incorporates features that use Spotlight, Address Book, the Keychain, the Finder, the Dock, Bonjour, Services, and System Preferences.
I'll try alternating FF and Camino for a while and see which I like better.

Update 9/24/06: Camino is impressive. It's much faster than Firefox on my old G3 iBook, it works with all FF sites, and I don't have to deal with Adobe's kludged PDF integration -- Camino just downloads the PDFs. I like the fine touches, like the "Search this site" option in the embedded Google searchbar. I love the Keychain integration -- that makes up for all the missing Firefox extensions I can't use. It's my browser for now.

Update 9/24/06: Still enamored with Camino. It uses Gecko 1.8, same as FF 1.5. (FF 2.0, due to ship RC1 on 9/26 uses Gecko 1.9.)

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