I’m looking at what it will take for WebnoteHappy to support browsers other than Safari. The top request is for Firefox. So I’ve been looking at Firefox, Camino, and OmniWeb.
OmniWeb is probably the most feature-filled browser for the Mac but I haven’t really tried it out much. I do know some people who really like it.
Firefox is probably the least Mac-friendly browser. It has a woeful AppleScript dictionary that seems to date back to the first release of Netscape for the Mac. And it uses its own private password database instead of using the Keychain. But if you also use Firefox on Linux or Windows, then it is familiar.
Camino is a nice happy middle. It is like “Firefox for the Mac”. It has a good AppleScript dictionary, it uses the Keychain, it uses native OS X widgets, and so on. So here’s my question:
Why don’t Mac users use Camino instead of Firefox? Is it just marketing? Or does Firefox have some advantage over Camino? I guess I’m making a plea here for Mac users who use Firefox to try out Camino and see if it fits them better.
(BTW, I use Safari most of the time and then drop down into Camino or Firefox when there is a site that doesn’t support Safari, which is relatively rare.)
I agree, when I’m not using Safari/NNW I’m using Camino. If OmniWeb supported the ctrl+cmd+d => “popup definition” I’d probably be back on OmniWeb. As for why people choose Firefox, I think a lot of people who choose Firefox on the mac use it because there exists some *crucial* extension(s) that either doesn’t exist for Camino, or they don’t know it exists. As someone who’s tried many many extensions, I’m quite content with my web browser dedicated to web browsing, but we all work differently. Choice is good.
For me, I use Safari mainly but also use Firefox during development because of all the tools it has. I too dislike it’s non-Mac attributes, but let it go since they provide such unique and useful tools (like the web developer extension).
I’m a new Mac user (was a life long windows user and wanted to try something new) and I’ve used Firefox on Windows, and on the Mac. I use Camnio because of it’s Keychain intergration – and eaiser bookmarking system. Although I may switch back to Firefox because of all the useful extentions and give up the keychain access.
I have been using the mac for a few years now and I believe Firefox has an advantage over Camino. Certain features like yahoo mail rich text feature do not work on Camino but work just fine on firefox. Also firefox has loads of extentions and skins that I am sure are not available for Camino.
Today websites are optimized with IE and Firefox in mind. I have a very old Ibook. 600MHz 14 Inch. When I open ebay or certain Cricket forums then camino and safari have a very hard time but firefox works just fine.
Although I use Safari, between camino and firefox I would say firefox has an edge.
I’ve been using Opera as a default on the Mac for a while.
To answer your question, though, the main reasons I used Firefox instead of Camino for a long time: (1) there are so many more extensions available for Firefox, (2) Firefox lets you have a bookmarks sidebar (as does Opera); Camino doesn’t. I really liked having all my bookmarks visible, and easily manipulated through a sidebar. And a small, nice thing about Firefox: Ctrl-F gets you an inline find function, while with Camino it doesn’t.
I switched from Firefox to Opera for several months because Opera was much more stable; and the latest Firefox (1.5) has a big blank window area at the bottom which annoys me.
I’m trying out Camino now, though, because it (and OmniWeb) do feel much better and Mac-like; and I may get used to pulling bookmarks out of the folders at the top of the browser window instead of a sidebar.
Overall I prefer and use Camino virtually all of the time. I do wish there were an option for a SideDock BookMark. I’m not so worried about extensions like many people seem to be. Camino seems fast, well integrated into OSX. I really like it.
Omniweb the quintessential Mac browser
I use Camino as my primary browser on the mac. I find the keychain access and integration to be the key for this. I do not use safari unless i REALLY have to, it isn’t even my secondary browser. I use Opera as my big second. Opera 9. I find 9 to be much better than 8 0n the mac. I have both osx and windows systems. on the windows it is opera all the way. I don’t use firefox, it is slow and cumbersome on windows. opera these days always performs better. there are a few sites that can cause problems but this is rare. firefox on the mac?! no way! extensions and other such *vital* stuff are said to come along in 1.1 version of Camino. Until then i am happy to use opera and Camino. Although Opera tends to be a touch faster and has good rss.
Here’s an answer from the future, although I was using Firefox even when you posted..
The reasons are.. 1) I don’t care about Keychain. If I have logins for Web sites and I only use Firefox, then keeping them in Firefox is fine. 2) I don’t care about AppleScript, I’ve never used it. 3) I prefer the Windows-esque widgets. I’m looking at things on Web pages, not a Mac app, and I like them to look different.. makes it all obvious it’s not a proper app, etc. 4) All the extensions.
I use firefox because the keybinding “CMD+ENTER” does not seem to work/exist on Camino. It sounds a bit silly but I systematically use “Find as you type” and “CMD+ENTER” to open links in the background and cannot do without it.
I find every browser on OS X is lacking “something”. On Windows, I didn’t have this problem because Firefox was the only thing that didn’t suck :)
I personally use Camino as my first choice while browsing – it is fast and has style. Sadly, it doesn’t meet all my needs so I have to switch to Firefox for web development as I find the development environment much richer. I will then tab over to Flock if I want to write a quick blog entry. Of course, I also need to use Safari for testing.
All this tabbing about used to be real pain in the *** because these browsers didn’t share passwords. This is why I wrote 1Passwd. 1Passwd is a Password Manager & AutoFill program that integrates with the OS X Keychain. 1Passwd integrates directly with Camino, Safari, Firefox, and Flock so that no matter which one you are using you never need to leave your browser to find your passwords.
I use Firefox, because some great extensions available. I agree that it feels less mac- like than safari, but you can install a different theme to make it look more like your other osx apps.
I use UNO, you can download it from here: http://takebacktheweb.org/
Firefox has Adblock for free. Camino’s ad blocker isn’t very good. That’s why I use Firefox.
I live and die for the google toolbar… to the best of my knowledge they dont make it for camino or safari… till then I wont even look elsewhere from firefox…
-rm
i use safari most of the time, used to use camino alot, but am using firefox more now as a backup.
FF is nice, and has some advantages over safari, but safari just feels right … the stability is great, and the keychain integration saves time.
FF is attractive, and i often use it for a week or two exclusively, but always go back to safari.
i could care less about the google extras on FF. i have a gmail notifier on my mac, tho i use gmail less and less….way too much spam.
I use Firefox on my Mac because it feels comfortable and because of the web developer toolbar. My primary os is Linux but I use Windows and OSX quite often, Firefox looks, feels, and behaves the same on all three operating systems.
[…] (I’ve got a popular blog post about Camino vs Firefox and it seems like a majority of the comments are pro-Firefox. Plus, Mint tells me that 46% of visitors to happyapps.com are using Safari, 37% Firefox, and Camino only garnering 8%.) […]
I wonder how many people are using Firefox on OS X (for any reason, including popularity and hype) who’ve never heard of and/or tried Camino as a viable alternative. In an inverse sort of way, it’s hard to imagine anyone who’s aware of Camino not also knowing about Firefox and making a more conscientiously educated choice of which browser(s) they use.
If it could be measured, I think the percentage of technical savvy would likely be “significantly” higher for Camino than Firefox users. Correlating qualitative information like that with simple usage quantities can make statistical results more interesting and meaningful than the raw numbers alone, of course.
I’m a new macbook user. I’ve had to force quit firefox 2.0 4 times in the last 3 days. That’s not good. I’m going to try camino now I guess.
Comes down to what you need. If you need to run extensions (ie FireBug) then you need firefox. If you want ease of use (Keychain access) use camino. As for me I use safari until I need to debug (Firefox) and if a web page is unsupported in safari I open Camino. This may change with FF 2 but lack of keychain still sucks. I guess we’ll have to wait for FF 3 to see if they integrate it. I am curious as to why the extensions don’t work on camino but, im sure the codebase is way off from what FF is using. So it just breaks the extension implementation. Oh well it would be nice if Camino just supported FF extensions.
I use Google Browser Sync that syncs my bookmarks, passwords, browsing history between my work IBM laptop and home Mac.
I have an imac, intel core duo, 1.83 ghz, 512 mb, 667 mhz. I am fairly new on a mac. After a couple of months I noticed Safari was buggy, and starting to clog or become “sticky” so I switch to Firefox. It was great for a couple of months then I noticed the same problems Safari was having. So I switched to Camino. This is the best browser that I ever used………it’s fast, does not hang up, no ads, no pop-ups……I hope this does not start to “stick”.
Can anyone explain why Safari and Firefox started giving me a hard time?
My background with computers:
I do a lot of searching and reading online and consider myself a rookie at building websites….using Dreamweaver, html, final cut pro, flash, and photoshop. I am also a guitar player and fool around with garageband, cakewalk, ect…
thanks,
Joe
I’ve been using a macbook since the summer. Generally I use Safari but from time to time I find a web page that it doesn’t handle particularly well so I switch to Firefox. The only reason I installed Firefox is because I was familiar with it (as I’ve been a long time Windows user) and used to use it as an alternative to IE (before the release of 7). I was actually unaware that Camino existed until I was reading the Mozilla site this morning, so that’s why I never used it. I will be using it now though. :)
camino is the sh**….bar none!
it is hands down the fastest browser for mac
noticeably more so than safari,
however it is obvious that it is just not as supported as IE, Firefox and Safari,
the only time I don’t use camino is when i hit a site that only supports the “big 3” browsers
I can safely say that I’ve tried several dozen browsers for the Mac over the years and I keep coming back to Camino.
It is the fastest browser I’ve seen.
Keychain integration is a must for me. Keychain Access allows some organization of passwords which the ugly Firefox preference pane just can’t match. And then there’s the fact that the Keychain is SECURE and encrypted.
I’ve found it’s ad-blocking features to be far better than Opera, or Safari. Everytime I use an alternate browser I’m shocked to see all ads on my favorites sites.
Admitedly feature-poor compared to Firefox, there is a lot you can do to add features, such as find as you type, to Camino. Check out http://www.pimpmycamino.com/.
Nicholas: CMD-Clicking a link opens it in the background, as does the middle mouse button, if you have to use a scroll-wheel mouse.
At the moment I am mainly using Camino as it is fast and stable. I used to use and still use Firefox on Windows all the time, but on the Mac it is not as stable and it hogs more system resources. Obviously, this is down to the GUI environment. The thing Camino is lacking is the research and development to take it on to the same level as the other main browers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer, who probably have thousands of people working on their browsers.
Camino can only get better. The only real complaint I have is some large flash things don’t work in Camino like The Pursuit of Happiness official website. Personally I think some websites rely way too much on Flash but that’s just the way life is. Also a few sites only support Internet Explorer and FireFox. This is poor design on the web developers part, but then again this is just life!
I have tried out OmniWeb and I am not too impressed with it, and couldn’t see myself using all those features. I would also not spend money on a web browser either. I have tried Opera only briefly, I think I will try Opera in more depth now, for some reason I never have liked Opera since I tried it on Windows when it installed some advertising stuff. However, now I hear that it is completely free without the advertising and no longer costs $39.
I don’t really have any complaints about Safari, it is a good web browser, however it can be a bit unstable at times. I may even go back to using Safari as my main browser. Being a new Mac user converting from Windows, there are a lot more decisions and I still need to figure out which browser is for me, I have four browsers installed anyway just incase, leaving my main one in the dock and using Spotlight when I need another.
One bad thing about Camino is that it really is quite slow. Safari is blazing. A YouTube video in Safari took a quarter of the time the same video took in Camino. Otherwise, it is quite a nice browser and I use it when Safari is not supported.
i mostly use the camino nightly builds and dowload the latest nightly build every few months. i find it is much faster and more stable than safari.
I’ve used Camino for year but just switched back to Firefox. Camino is tad slower than firefox in most sites and crawls to halt with flash pages. Combine that with lack of working AdBlock support.
I use Firefox but have just downloaded Camino to try it out. Having only used for around 30 minutes I can’t really compare the two browsers in any detail but Camino certainly appears faster than Firefox. The things which make Firefox great for me are ultimately what slow it down, namely the extensions. Firefox add-ons such as ‘mouse gestures’ and web development extensions such as CSS Viewer are so important to me I’d be hard pushed to give them up, even if it did mean gaining a little more speed. For people who want to speed up Firefox I found these tips useful: http://www.tweakfactor.com/articles/tweaks/firefoxtweak/4.html
I hate Firefox. Camino is so much simpler, and snappier! I haven’t found an extension I thought was worth using Firefox. My friends rave for AdBlock, but Camino seems to have a built-in ad blocker. Why should I spend a few seconds every time i visit a new page allowing or disallowing ads/java/flash? And there’s like ugly AdBlock tabs all over the place that are more annoying than the ads they’re blocking. The only thing Camino needs is the ability to change the search engine in the toolbar, especially to Goodsearch and Wikipedia for me.
Firefox, all the way. Here’s why: Adblock Plus (with the Filterset.G updater companion, so I don’t, as Iowen said, have to spend any time allowing or disallowing anything — someone else does all that!), Web Developer, FireBug, Gspace, Gmail Mananer. Gmail is spammy? No way, I get hundreds of spams a day, and maybe one, MAYBE, creeps into my inbox in any given week, and I’ve yet to see a mislabel good mail in my spam box, and I’ve been using Gmail since early invitation. I use each of those, particularly the Gmail Manager and FireBug, almost every day, I couldn’t get on without it. Plus, I do quite a bit of work on both Windows and Macs, so having to readjust to different browsers would be very annoying. Besides, standards are good, and Firefox is the first all around adapatable browser out there. IE, Safari, Opera, Camino, and even Mozilla/Netscape itself, should all be done away with, or assimilated as nothing but skins for Firefox… when that happens (regardless of code base really, just as long as there is a standard that is actually adopted by all players) the Web will be made a much better place. For me, going to a site that I need to view that doesn’t support my browser is infuriating enough to make me not want to use that browser…. not enough to make me use IE though :) Then again, on Windows anyway, that’s what the FF IE View extension is good for!!
I am an avid Camino 1.5 user, yet occasionally try out other browsers too. Here is a post from a few months ago that address another made-for-mac browser,
http://thunkdifferent.wordpress.com/2007/04/23/shiira-browser-maximizes-os-104/
[…] Camino vs Firefox – Happy Apps […]
@lowen:
Just use keywords to search from the address bar in Camino for Wikipedia, etc. See http://www.lifehacker.com/software/bookmarks/hack-attack-firefox-and-the-art-of-keyword-bookmarking-196779.php
personally I like Safari but it always crashes after a while I’m using it and since it still doesn’t have a previous-session-restart I find it a bit annoying using it.
so my second option would be Camino, I like it. it’s nice and fast and the layout is cool too.
Firefox I find a bit too boring to look at. lol.
Don’t miss out Flock on a Mac
I have just had a nightmarish time getting rid of Firefox and will never use it again. I was pretty happy with until, one day, it decided that three web sites I’d just visited had to stay open forever. You know, on that handy bar where all the sites stay open that session stay open — I forget whaqt it’s called.
Anyway, these dang sites stayed open day after day no matter what I did. Drove me crazy since I had no intention of visiting them again. I uninstalled and reinstalled. No change. Then I just uninstalled. Forget it. Firefox wouldn’t go away. So I deleted every reference to Firefox I could find (using Spotlight). No chance.
I did finally get rid of the icon in Applications. But it still showed up in Spotlight as an item in Library/Documentation — not that it was actually there. By this time, Firefox existed only in the Dock but it functioned just fine — I am serious! Of course, the web sites I never wanted to see again open every time I opened the browser, and they stayed open no matter what I did.
Finally, today, I used AppDelete to get rid of all the remnants of Firefox, supposedly. Didn’t work. FIrefox still opened just fine but the Google search bar didn’t work any longer. After about an hour of repeatedly using Spotlight to find every trace of Firefox and either moving it to trash or using AppDelete, Firefox seems to have gone.
Safari doesn’t work well on Blogspot so I guess I’ll try Camino, next. Wish me luck.
[…] Now, the reason of my post is that I am wondering which browser will I use as my primary surfing board. Of course, I realise this can be a highly subjective question, but ultimately it comes down to what best fits your requirements and basic needs. I have done some basic research already (thank you to Happy Apps for laying the ground) and some browsers are already pointing their heads out of the pack, namely Camino, Firefox, and Opera. I have been using Firefox on Windows, but Camino seems to seamlessly communicate with the Mac OS native features, so I’m going to try it out. […]
I’ve recently upgraded to Tiger, thanks to an ebay purchase, I was previously running jaguar 10.2.8, on my slightly antiquated emac 700Mhz G4 (640mbRam). My jaguar emac came with IE for mac which was ok back in 03, but is now defunct. Until i Tigered, I could not get Safari, and so I had Firefox.
I grew to love FF, especially the customisability, and the extensions, my favourites being Foxytunes and Ebay companion. I now have Safari, which seems to me to be fastest, with Camino coming in a very close second.
Thing is, and I know this is pathetic, I could probably forgo foxytunes (especially with iTunes widget) and ebay extension; I only joined ebay to get Tiger, but the thing is, and this is totally pathetic…I really, really, really love the firefox Icon in my dock!
camino do not support extensions, that cool features like “Mouse Gesture” that i love in firefox
i’m a longtime windows user now switching to mac, and although firefox is very handy at times, one of the major reasons (among many) that i’m making the switch is because mac is just so much more beautiful, something firefox takes away. camino feels more like it belongs in a mac. web development is a different story…
[…] your requirements and basic needs. I have done some basic research (thank you to Happy Apps for laying the ground) and some browsers are already pointing their heads out of the pack, namely Camino, Firefox, and […]
anything vs firefox…. firefox wins… if only coz its so extensible… how can you compare the ease of searching all ur fav search engines (wiki,youtube,imdb,isohunt,mininova,google) all under 20 odd seconds? cmd+t+k+up/down (to select ur search engine) and search! how cud u beat that?
firefox is THE best… until anything better comes out…
I like camino… But I cant open gmail. from within camino. I dont understand why… since gmail works in firefox. In camino it just keeps endlessly reloading the page. Sad.
Rolf,
Gmail in Camino 1.6 seems to load fine for me.
I choose firefox 3.0 MAC because of it’s better logo than camino. that is really just about all.
to shikhanshu,
ever heard of Opera? if speed searching is all you care about, you should consider switching…
i use firefox because i am a windows user and camino doesn’t run on my pc. firefox is very well integrated in my system, especially all right click functions ore middle mb functions. i like all my extensions and i could not imagine living without them. google preview, such a usefull tool… or my middle mouse button function, middle click on a tab closes it, middle click on the tab bar opens it again. middle click on back, forward ore the a bookmark opens it in a new tab. my mouse even got 2 extra buttons for forward and backward. that’s another level of web browsing. and to the keychain access: windows got no keychain so i don’t have that question. but i also have the possibility to import passwords from the internet explorer.
I definitely use Firefox because of its extensions and add-ons. I used Camino for quite long but I ended switching to Firefox later.
Just waiting now for the 64-bit version!