780 A few weeks back, I checked out the Camino 1.0 Alpha 1 browser, and while I found it fast and attractive looking, and finally was able to support drag and drop from other applications into certain web page text fields, I encountered what seemed to be a memory leak. when the browser was open, after several hours used my computer would start to slow down, and there would be an extraordinary amount of Page out the memory access from the swap files on the hard drive. Quitting Camino would restore normalcy.

So naturally that was something I look for but I began testing Camino 1.0b1, which was released last week. So far, after 10 days or so of use, that problem hasn't manifested itself. Presumably it has been addressed among the long list of refinements and bug fixes in this version of Camino - too numerous to include here. You can check them out at:
http://www.caminobrowser.org/releases/10b1.html

Here are a few highlights of feature improvements:
• New tab bar appearance
• Download pause and resume
• Nuisance blocking (advertisements, popups, and more)
• Certificate support for improved security
• Java Embedding Plugin to bring better Java performance
• Form auto-completion
• History searching
• Upgrades the Gecko HTML rendering engine from Mozilla 1.7 to Mozilla 1.8, resulting in performance, stability, and rendering improvements as well as Midas support

According to the developers, this version of Camino 1.0 Beta 1 is close to its final shipping state. The goal of this early release is to demonstrate progress, and for people to report issues early on in the development cycle so that they can be addressed.

Camino is the only native OS X browser using Mozilla.org's Gecko HTML rendering engine ( Also used in Firefox, Netscape, and the Mozilla/ SeaMonkey Internet suite applications). Camino 1.0 Beta 1 shares the same code base with Firefox 1.5 (it's based on the Mozilla 1.8 CVS branch), so shares many of the security fixes and Gecko improvements that are in that version of Firefox. Note that Camino no longer supports Mac OS X 10.1. People still using OS X 10.1 are advised to stay with Camino 0.8.4.

Dating from Camino 0.9, the interface has been upgraded. Running Tiger, Camino has adopted the unified toolbar look. It now looks a lot more like Safari then it does Firefox, which I'm not sure is an aesthetic improvement, but that's a matter of taste I guess. Another Safari idea Camino has borrowed is tabs pinned to the left rather than centered, and with a close button in each tab, which I do prefer and find much more convenient that having to mouse over to the far right of the window or use a contextual menu to close a tab.
Camino starts up considerably quicker then Firefox or Opera, but it's not quite as quick as Safari in that department. It can block ad banners and you can allow specified sites to bypass the popup blocker. With this release, Camino now supports resuming paused downloads but it still has no RSS feed support.
One of my first impressions was that this browser is really fast. I didn't do any timed comparisons, but Camino is now definitely in the same speed pack as Firefox, Opera, and Safari. I wouldn't venture to say which is faster at this point.
Camino still has powerful version 8 features like the bookmark import capabilities of any Mac browser, with integrated Rendezvous, Address Book top 10 list and Search, a Google Search bar, session history on back/forward buttons, improved cookie management, a more compact download manager, white-list for popup blocking, and
incremental find-as-you-type.

One cool and convenient new wrinkle in the latest versions of Camino is that the Preferences now have a pull down menu for selecting the default browser on your machine,so that you no longer have to open Safari Preferences to set or change the default browser configuration.

To import bookmarks from another browser. Run Camino, choose "Import Bookmarks" from the Camino menu. In the resulting file dialog, choose the bookmarks file you wish to import, and click Open. The bookmarks will be imported into a new container in the bookmarks manager.

Camino 9 has a Safari-style Bookmarks manager window which I like a lot better than the erstwhile Bookmark sidebar.

Camino practices the Tao of simplicity with an uncluttered user interface but with the features you expect from a modern browser. The Camino Preferences dialog is very clean looking as well.

One annoyance niggle, I prefer browsers to keep adding tabs in the visible window, rather than in a submenu after a certain number have accumulated. Opera and iCab do the former, while Camino does the latter.Of course, some users may prefer the submenu mode.

Camino 1.0b1 is a relatively modest download (about 7.5 MB), and is well worth checking out, Especially if you are a big fan of Apple's OS X Cocoa appearance conventions, and like the idea of using a Mac-only browser.

System requirements:
• Mac OS X 10.2 or later
• 128 MB Ram
• 30 MB free hard drive space

Camino is freeware

For more information, visit:
http://www.caminobrowser.org/


Charles W. Moore

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