I mentioned earlier that I had switched to Mozilla Firefox (then called Firebird) as my default web browser, from Mozilla (I still use Mozilla on Solaris). In the last few months, the Firefox bandwagon started becoming mainstream, probably due to exasperation with the continuing security holes in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

That said, I have also switched to the Mac at home, and Firefox on Mac OS X often feels like an afterthought. Several bugs have gone unfixed in the last three releases or so, even though patches have been submitted. I am not excessively fond of Safari, Apple’s default browser, and the ability to share profile data between my Windows machine at work and my Mac at home is a big benefit.

Two weeks ago, I tried Camino on my home machine. Camino is a derivative of Mozilla – it uses the same HTML rendering engine, but wraps it in a shell that leverages Apple’s technologies the way a cross-platform browser like Firefox or Mozilla can’t. Earlier versions had been unconvincing, but I switched for the 0.8.1 release. Firefox 1.0PR on the Mac is an unalloyed disaster, buggy and crash-prone, without any visible bug fixes (I switched back to 0.9.3 within a couple of hours), and that was probably the last straw.

The immediate benefits Camino brings me are the following:

• Middle-clicking on a link opens it in a new tab, the way it does for Firefox on all platforms but the Mac
• Navigating through Web forms using the tab key works perfectly, when Firefox and Safari will only let you switch between text fields, but not pull-down menus, radio buttons or the like.
• When minimizing windows using Exposé, there is no annoying Firefox or Mozilla ghost window cluttering the screen.

Of course, not all is perfect, and the migration entails these pitfalls:

• I have Firefox set up so if I type a few words separated by spaces in the URL bar, it searches Google. This avoids the need for two text boxes, one for th URL and one for searching (the way Firefox does in its default configuration, or Safari), which are redundant and not as usable. Unfortunately Camino does not support this directly and pops up a modal dialog box complaining about the illegal URL format. Fortunately, Camino does support Mozilla’s excellent keywords feature, so I created a keyword “g” to handle Google queries.
• Camino keeps bookmarks in a OS X style XML plist format, rather than the standard bookmark format used by other Mozilla variants. This makes synchronizing bookmarks a little bit slower, as you have to use the import utility instead of simply copying a file over. Bookmark imports are not perfect, moreover, as they tend to drop separators.
• The saved passwords are not interoperable, as Camino stores them in OS X’s Keychain manager instead of Mozilla’s encrypted database format (I don’t know if this means Camino and Safari can share passwords). I have started working on Python modules to read and decrypt the Mozilla files, however, and I have a low-priority password sync project on my back burner.
• Camino doesn’t have the wealth of extensions Firefox does, but then again since they seem to break with every release of Firefox (and many don’t work well on the Mac), this is less of a disadvantage than may seem at first glance.