They really haven't added that much, alot of it is stuff they have already had in the nightly builds. I think i will stick with Safari.

More importantly, when's the next Safari beta? MacRumors are reporting on Beta 64 and I still can't get my hands on v62!! ;-)

Noah said:

'They really haven't added that much, alot of it is stuff they have already had in the nightly builds. I think i will stick with Safari."

They haven't added anything (except the change to the user agent and version strings) that wasn't already in the nightly builds. Developement happens daily and the daily/nightly builds track that. That you can see the progress on any given day doesn't negate the fact that lots has happened since the last release, 0.6. Just the opposite, it means you don't have to beg and plead in the weblogs of browser developers for the next "beta" release that MacRumors is reporting about but you can't see.

--Asa

Noah... that is what the nightly builds are for. They are placed out there for those who want the most up-to-date (and yet possibly unstable) copy of Camino.

Asa stole the words from my mouth ;)

I haven't updated my nightly build ever since Safari was released, and yet Camino 0.7 doesn't really have anything that my nightly build didn't, from the description (it probably just fixed a few things and made a few improvements, but no new features or anything else that made it into the description).

And the only reason I downloaded 0.7 is because my brother uses that (when he occasionally uses this computer). Strange boy. Safari's better.

I still think 'Jock Itch' is a better name than Camino.

You're a funny one Frodo. You're tarnishing that name of yours.

I just downloaded Camino 0.7, and it's pretty nice and has a few advantages over Safari. (My favorite one: it doesn't crash on devedge.netscape.com!) Unfortunately, speed does not seem to be one of them. From some very informal measures, I peg this version of Camino as between 0-50% slower than Safari. I did see the article on mozilla.org about how Camino 0.8 would probably be faster, but on the flip side, I suspect that by that time, Safari will have gained some more in standards compliance. Another issue
is that Safari, unlike Camino, lets you use emacs-like editing keys in textareas like this one, and that's awfully tough for me to back away from.

For me, the only killer feature that Mozilla has that neither Safari nor Camino has is the "type ahead to links in the webpage" thing. Really, I don't know how I live without this feature except for the fact that Mozilla is much slower (and much less pretty, interface-wise) than the other two Mac browsers.

To get the "hypothetical" Safari builds, get Carracho. :)

Marc

Jonathon King wrote: "From some very informal measures, I peg this version of Camino as between 0-50% slower than Safari."

0-50%? That's a pretty wide margin of error you've got there! The Camino development team plan to move to the Mozilla trunk for 0.8, which should give Camino a nice speed increase. I assume the move to the trunk will also mean that Camino gains Mozilla's Type As You Find feature but don't quote me on that.

I'm not sure what benchmarks are most commonly used to show Safari being faster than Chimera/Camino, but it's clearly not one that involves large tables with embedded forms.

I have a daily management script which displays a table with hundreds of rows, each of which has various form elements in it. I scroll down page after page, making various entries and flipping switches, and at the end I press a button to submit the whole form.

Chimera/Camino is as responsive at the end of the page as at the top-- I can click in a text field and immediately type, or I can go straight from a drop-down SELECT menu to highlighting text in an input field, and there's no delay.

But in Safari, after I've gotten about halfway down the page, the responsiveness of the various form elements goes waaaaay down. Sometimes it's as much as a second before it gives me mouse focus; sometimes I even get the pinwheel cursor before I can type in a text field.

Safari's nice and zippy at layout, but when it comes to applications that stress it out, I still have to fall back on Camino to get my work done.

I hope there's some chance of the Safari team looking into this. (If Camino can perform this well, surely Safari can.) I can put together an acid-test page if need be.

Thanks for all the hard work across the browser world, Dave and co.!

Are there any way to share prefs, bookmarks, history etc between Camino and Mozilla? I need Mozilla, but I would like to use Camino, but with different history, bookmarks etc Camino is not an option.

Thanks

Brian, an acid test page would be really useful. Put it up somewhere and mail me a URL.

>0-50%? That's a pretty wide margin of error you've got
>there! The Camino development team plan to move to the
>Mozilla trunk for 0.8, which should give Camino a nice
>speed increase. I assume the move to the trunk will also
>mean that Camino gains Mozilla's Type As You Find
>feature but don't quote me on that.

I wanted to be fair. I found a couple of things that Camino did as quickly as Safari, but most were slower and some of them were tragically slower. So, for example scrolling through the CSS pages at w3c.org is so bad with Camino on my iMac that I couldn't even bother to time it. That was the only situation where it was unusably slow, though, and I do expect that the move to a newer faster version of Gecko will help a lot of things. If they call it Type as You Find, that *is* what I really want in at least one of the Mac browsers. I'm a keyboard kind of guy despite being a Mac user.

Jonathan King said: "If they call it Type as You Find, that *is* what I really want in at least one of the Mac browsers."

Actually, it was called Type Ahead Find at first and now it's Find As You Type. But I confuse the two and call it Type As You Find. :-)

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ui/accessibility/typeaheadfind.html

Hmm, I found Kevin's comment interesting. I tried Chimera .2 way back in the day, and dropped it quickly, as it was missing too many minor features that added up to a lot for me. On the day Safari was released, I grabbed it and the latest Chimera (.6). I tried them both. Safari was missing some key features for me, the most important being one I got hooked on in OmniWeb, URL Shortcuts (for lack of an official name). The way I had OW configured, and the way I now have Camino configured, is such that I can type g my search terms and it goes to google and produces a search for my+search+terms. This works for any site that uses urls like google does. I have shortcuts for images., news. and www.google.com, dictionary.com, thesaurus.com, half.com, imdb.com, versiontracker.com and more. They speed up my life a lot more than Safari's faster rendering might. This feature is simply a must have for me now to consider a new browser. Camino's implementation of it is less than ideal (I'm forced to create bookmarks for those sites, and the only reason I found it was because I was griping to a friend about why I couldn't switch when he pointed the method out to me, whereas OW had a preference for it), but once you have the browser trained, it's excellent.

So what features do people see Safari offering that Camino doesn't? I'm interested to know why people think Safari is currently better than Camino. When I used it, Chimera just seemed like Safari++.

I found something interesting while I was using Camino. I tried visiting my website to check out the userAgent, and it looks like it's still identified as Chimera 0.6. Oops! ... ?

>So what features do people see Safari offering that
>Camino doesn't?

Google in the toolbar.
SnapBack.
Automatic download tidy-up.
Better bookmark management.
Better tab implementation.
Non-stupid application name.

- ahem -

Sorry, that should be "Theoretically better tab implementation."

And just for the record, I think Chim...Camino is swell. It's just not Safari.

Google I've got, but better.

I really didn't find Snapback that useful - in what instances do you find it handy?

I haven't toyed with Camino's downloads manager, but what does Safari do to 'clean up'? Passes things off to other apps?

The fact that Safari can't slurp other apps bookmarks was a decent deterrent to me.

I'll hold off commenting on tabs for now.

Come on, that last one's not a reason.

I like Chimera/Camino. I always keep a recent build in my Dock. However, I prefer using Safari. I just feels better, more polished, and more integral with the Mac. It is a totally subjective thing. Hard to describe.

I certainly can find to reason to argue with people who like Camino better. I will continue to download it evaluate it as is progresses.

-R

I prefer Camino, Safari's too unstable, at least in my Mac. Crashes all the freakin' time.

I prefer Safari to Camino any day, but v62 had a webpage or two that didnt work that worked on v60, and v64 had another couple webpages that didn't work... Perhaps that's why they werent public releases though?

Kevin, not all Safari builds are public because Safari is a closed-source product (well, bits of it are open-source but the product as a whole is proprietary). Tsk, you people, you've been spoilt by open source! You'll be wanting a public bug tracking database and an anonymous CVS server next!

Safari's history menu is far superior to Camino's. I want a global history, not 'history for this window'. The sidebar is a poor substitute, especially since it's sorted by site and not by chronological order.
And I really wish there were a way to force Cam to display source in a new window, instead of tabs. (I hate tabs. One hidden preference to turn all tabbed browsing features off would be beautiful.)

Paul:

I used Chimera myself pretty much exclusively after version 0.4 -- untill MWSF 2003. I agree that it's just fine.

I think you're referring to the "http://www.google.com/search?q=%s" bookmark trick in Camino? I agree that works really well; however, it's not a very obvious procedure to the first-time user.

I use SnapBack quite a bit, primarily via the keyboard shortcuts. Mostly when digging through search results, but also to avoid hitting "back" several times from deep within a site.

Apple makes this claim about downloads with Safari:

"All you?ll see is the fully decompressed file ? not a collection of .bin or .gz files floating around your desktop. You can even install an application without switching to the Finder. Safari automatically copies applications from disk images, then puts that image away."

To tell the truth, I'm not sure this feature is working yet. But it sure sounds good. :)

As far as bookmark management: I've never seen it handled as well as in Safari. You're right that Safari won't import Camino's bookmarks. (It does import IE's, though.) But once you're moved over it's very easy to organize.

One thing I don't like about tabs in Camion is cycling through them with command-shift-brackets. I find the arrow keys much more accessible; and were Safari to have a tab implementation which used command-shift-left- and right-arrow instead, I'd have to acknowledge its superiority.

I prefer Safari because they are taking a typically thorough Apple approach to the whole UI (e.g. being able to empty the cache without burrowing through the prefs). However Camino is still my default browser because, firstly too many of my favourite sites (eg MacUser, the MacOSXhints forum, and my Bank) either do not render properly in Safari or the cookies that enable you to log in automatically do not work. The other related feature that I really miss in Safari is the integration with the keychain for web site passwords. When this happens I will probably switch to Safari as my main browser.

Unlike some others here I love Snapback. It took me a while to realise how useful it is, but now it stops me from missing tabs (though I have recently got hold of v 64 now just to check this out!)

Safari is more useful to me than Camino because it lets me page UP with modifer+spacebar (in this case Shift; in IE, Option). On a laptop with no PageUp button (without using both hands on opposite ends of the keyboard), this is essential to speedy browsing for me.

Camino and Mozilla only let you page *down* with the spacebar. Bah.

Steve, shift+space works in all Mozilla browser based on the Mozilla trunk. Camino 0.7 is still based on an old Mozilla 1.0 branch, but as soon as it goes back to the trunk (my bet is after Mozilla 1.4 is released), shift+space will beworking, as well as a LOT of improvements, speed gains, fixed bugs...

Just compare Mozilla 1.0 performance with current mozilla builds performances to have a forestaste of the engine improvements Camino 0.8 will enjoy.

I can't wait for Safari to get a REAL download manager like IE's. I need the ability to download each and every file to a location of my choosing. I can't. I can only chose the default single location. So I have to resort to drag and drop onto a finder window set to a chosen directory or use IE.

I dont know what to say, but i likeed it.