Camino

Open source; $0

Current Version: 1.0.4 (March 8, 2007) / 2.0.3 (May 27, 2010)

Camino (formerly Chimera) is an interesting beast. Basically, it's a streamlined version of the Mozilla web browser for Mac OS X, but with a twist: the back-end of the program utilizes Mac OS X's UNIX layer (including the Berkeley Standard Distribution networking stack) for speed and stability, and the front end (the user interface) is programmed using Cocoa, Mac OS X's object oriented programming interface.

What's the point? Speed - blazing speed. Camino is generally as fast as any Windows browser at loading individual pages - and that's a real treat. Camino is only a browser (no mail and news capabilities), yet that adds to its elegance and efficiency. Because the core code is based upon Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine, it behaves smoothly and maturely. As of version 1.0 and many, many years of development and "pre-1.0" status, it also has finally gained most of the preference-setting capabilities that users expect from a mature web browser (with some hidden preferences, to boot).

Version 2.0.3 is available for Mac OS X 10.4 and later, making many enhancements, including:

• Upgraded to version 1.9.0.19 of the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine, which includes several critical security and stability fixes.
• Prevented possible crashes when closing several tabs in succession.
• Bookmarks found in Spotlight searches will once again open in Camino.
• Bookmark import will no longer try to import old Firefox bookmarks.
• html files from profiles used by Firefox 3 and later. Camino no longer exports Spotlight metadata for menu spacers.
• "Reset Camino" will now always clear the "Recently Closed Pages" menu.
• The context menu in about:config is now functional.
• Insecure cookies will no longer be shown as secure in the list of cookies.
• Prevented possible crashes when software update fails to download information about available updates.
• Improved ad-blocking.

(Version 1.0.4 remains available for Mac OS X 10.2, and other older versions remain available as well.)

Camino was the first Gecko-based browser to run natively on Intel-based Macs, and I recommend that users of these Macs take the program out for a spin to see how it performs.

Why don't I make Camino a Drew's Pick? Well, principally because I think it's still lacking in some of Firefox's key configurability and extensibility, and I feel that there are still a few rough edges in its performance (for instance, Camino sometimes slows down when loading multiple tabs at once, and at least some key speed optimizations that have made it into Firefox - such as smoother support for the "general.smoothScroll" preference - remain to be optimized in Camino). Additionally, Camino is usually a bit behind in implementing the latest improvements in the Gecko rendering engine, although as of version 2, it's finally close to being on par with Firefox 3.5.