As long as I’ve been using a Mac I’ve been a fan of Safari. It’s a light weight, standards compliant browser which performs well. That was until a month back when I installed the latest Mac OS X 10.4.7 update. I’m convinced that since that update, Safari has become a processor hug when performing certain actions.
What I’ve found is that when a page hasn’t completely loaded, be it waiting for the final images to download off a slow server, that Safari hogs 100% of the CPU and usually I can’t even scroll the window. Another example is that when making a selection from a drop-down which drives a dynamic change in the subsequent drop-down (e.g. selecting State and then Town) is hangs for a good 5-10 seconds before responding. This wasn’t just one website, but many.
Fast forward to today. I’ve hit my limit and decided to dump Safari as my browser of choice. So what should I use instead ?
I tried Opera, but it doesn’t support accessing my corporate network over VPN and I can’t figure out why. Next was OmniWeb; fantastic features, but a $30 price tag, so not in the running. Obviously my choice comes down to FireFox which I’ve always had installed and use for those sights that Safari (really, WebKit) doesn’t fully support, but I’ve always found it sluggish and with a UI that isn’t Mac integrated.
Enter Camino. Camino, based on the same Mozilla Gecko rendering engine as Firefox, is a Macintosh native application which tightly integrates with Mac OS X through it’s native Cocoa interface. Built in Spotlight, Address Book, Keychain, Finder, Dock (I’m coping from the Camino feature set), Services and System Preferences integration makes it perform just as well, and as beautifully, as any other well designed Mac application. Aka, a pleasure to use.
Any drawbacks ? Plenty, unfortunately, but none that degrade general web surfing performance likely Safari’s CPU hogging. Camino doesn’t support FireFox extensions, but has a long list of additional features and a growing list of 3rd party add-ons at PimpMyCamino.com. The other main thing that’s frustrating me at present, which is no fault of Camino, is that the del.icio.us bookmark tool Caminicious doesn’t yet support the new del.icio.us API released recently and therefore I haven’t been able to update my bookmarks in a couple of weeks. Hopefully it won’t be long…
Anyway, check it out at caminobrowser.org
But I still didn’t buy a MacBook Pro. I followed all the press and blog posts regarding revision 1 issues with heat, noises, expanding batteries etc.. and the upcoming Core 2 Duos. With the Merom chips officially shipping it’s only a matter of time until Apple releases revision 2 of the MBP with Core 2 Duo chips. The Mac Pros now have them, it’s only a matter of time (weeks?) for MBPs and iMacs.
