Camino, ready for prime time?

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Camino is a relatively new web browser designed specifically for the Mac that brings the power of Mozilla’s gecko engine without the process weight and larger memory footprint of either Firefox or Mozilla. Camino emulates much of the Safari user experience in it’s simplicity, but still retains many of Mozilla’s features under the hood. (you can still get at it’s internals with the about:config URL) One of my biggest pet peeves with Safari is it’s broken JavaScript. As a sysadmin, I manage a lot of devices that rely on JavaScript & Java support. While Safari is generally adequate for surfing the web, it’s flaws become apparent when attempting to manage some hardware web interfaces. For this task I would usually open the Mac version of Firefox, but it’s huge memory footprint (compared with Safari) and process weight could bring my humble G4 iMac to its knees if I had more than a couple of apps open. I was discouraged by previous experiences with Camino, but this new 1.0 release looks to be fairly solid.

3 thoughts on “Camino, ready for prime time?”

  1. Update: It would appear that I may have spoken too soon. 2 minutes after publishing this article, I tried to manage a network switch with Camino. After a few seconds, the interface hadn’t loaded and I heard the hard disk swapping. I opened the Activity Monitor and saw that Camino had ballooned to 256MB and was still climbing. (a classic sign of a memory leak) This might be Java, or it might be Camino.. I’ll know for sure in a bit, but I’m starting to get discouraged again 🙁

  2. Update 2: The web interface I tried above has been troublesome in the past. The problem was Java related, but there is indeed a memory leak somewhere in Camino. At a minimum it does an extremely poor job of cleaning up after itself. At present I have 4 tabs open and Camino is consuming roughly 130MB of RAM. That’s just not right.

  3. After using Camino exlusively for the past 4 days, I can say that it’s definitely stable. It certainly isn’t as fast as Safari, but it’s not bad. It’s honestly about the same as Firefox with Java and Javascript, but startup time and process weight seem to be somewhat reduced by comparison. Java speed issues aren’t anything new to the Mac, so I’m just going to have to live with that. However, I’d like to see some improvement to the Javascript side of things. Other than that, I’m fairly impressed. Keep up the good work Mozilla!

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