Camino

Last night I spent some time playing around with Camino 0.8.2, Mozilla.org's web browser for Mac OS-X. Of course, since the full Mozilla suite and Firefox are available for Mac, one might wonder why there's yet another Gecko-based project for this platform.

The difference with Camino is that is uses the Cocoa user interface, so it looks like other apps written for Aqua, Mac OS-X's GUI. It fits in better with the Mac desktop aesthetically.

I used it for about 45 minutes or so last night on my iBook and Camino appears to be a competent browser. It has tabbed browsing and a built in popup blocker, like Firefox. Pages rendered similarly to those viewed in Firefox, although items like drop down boxes had the Aqua widget look.

Unfortunately, Camino seems to lack the customizability of Firefox. I didn't see any way to install extensions, which is a killer feature in Firefox. For example, I really like the Adblock extension which allows me to filter out a lot of crap. Hopefully, this is a feature that will make its way into Camino in the future.