Camino 0.8
May. 22nd, 2004 09:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinAfter a very long wait, Camino (the Mozilla project's native Aqua Web browser for Mac OS X, formerly known as Chimera) finally came out with another numbered beta release, and so far it looks really good—possibly good enough to switch me back from Safari. I've always thought that Camino makes better use of Apple's user interface than Apple's own browser does, and on Mac OS X it's much snappier and better-behaved than the port of Firefox; but I was unwilling to take my chances with the nightly builds in the absence of a designated release.
Version 0.8 finally makes Camino fully Panther-compatible, adds close-tab widgets like Safari's, introduces a new, colorful icon set that reminds me of the Linux version of Firefox, and moves the bookmark editor from a cramped side drawer to a new bookmarks screen obviously inspired by Safari's (but with some enhancements).
Some additional observations:
The treatment of large images displayed via image URL is very nice (like other modern browsers, but not Safari, it can display the image either full-sized or scaled to fit the window, with a magnifying glass tool to switch).
Camino's contextual menus are excellent. I don't know why Safari doesn't put basic navigation controls on the pop-up; it seems an obvious thing to do.
On the other hand, Camino's font selection dialog, while less buggy than it used to be, is still a little wacky. It tries to be intelligent about picking which font in a font family is the appropriate one for displaying ordinary text (as opposed to bold, italic, etc.) In early versions it would often guess catastrophically wrong and insist on outline or ultra-bold fonts, so that certain families became unusable without removing some of the fonts. Now it's better about that, but the font that is displayed in the font picker will often be different from the one that is actually used on the page, which is quite confusing. Part of the problem is that Camino is trying to be very faithful to the CSS conceptual model for handling fonts, which is fundamentally incompatible with the design of the OS X font-picker thing, in which you can't really pick a font family without also picking a font within the family. But the differences could be papered over better.
One disappointment: Camino still seems to lack live spell checking in edit windows. Safari now has this, which is very nice.
Version 0.8 finally makes Camino fully Panther-compatible, adds close-tab widgets like Safari's, introduces a new, colorful icon set that reminds me of the Linux version of Firefox, and moves the bookmark editor from a cramped side drawer to a new bookmarks screen obviously inspired by Safari's (but with some enhancements).
Some additional observations:
The treatment of large images displayed via image URL is very nice (like other modern browsers, but not Safari, it can display the image either full-sized or scaled to fit the window, with a magnifying glass tool to switch).
Camino's contextual menus are excellent. I don't know why Safari doesn't put basic navigation controls on the pop-up; it seems an obvious thing to do.
On the other hand, Camino's font selection dialog, while less buggy than it used to be, is still a little wacky. It tries to be intelligent about picking which font in a font family is the appropriate one for displaying ordinary text (as opposed to bold, italic, etc.) In early versions it would often guess catastrophically wrong and insist on outline or ultra-bold fonts, so that certain families became unusable without removing some of the fonts. Now it's better about that, but the font that is displayed in the font picker will often be different from the one that is actually used on the page, which is quite confusing. Part of the problem is that Camino is trying to be very faithful to the CSS conceptual model for handling fonts, which is fundamentally incompatible with the design of the OS X font-picker thing, in which you can't really pick a font family without also picking a font within the family. But the differences could be papered over better.
One disappointment: Camino still seems to lack live spell checking in edit windows. Safari now has this, which is very nice.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-05-22 10:58 am (UTC)1.) Keyboard-driven switching from one tab to the next, how is it? Firefox has this right, the old Camino didn't, and Safari really didn't.
2.) Tab-key and other keyboard-driven navigation within a web page -- can it do both the tab-from-link-to-link and the Firefox-style 'search for a phrase and go directly to it'? Any given one of the three browsers (Safari, old Camino, Firefox) would do one or the other, but not both. Actually, Firefox tries to do both, but I find it doesn't work too well under OS X as compared to under Win XP (http://texturizer.net/firefox/keyboard.html, Find As You Type Link, Find As You Type Text).
no subject
Date: 2004-05-22 02:03 pm (UTC)One thing I really, really like about Camino's tabs is that they use the garishly unambiguous Aqua standard for highlighting the active one; in Safari a two-tab window can be really confusing.
2. I can't get either of these to work at the moment. Tab seems to just switch between input elements on the page, if any. There are also some glitches associated with switching tabs while entering text in a text field. Again, keyboard-based, within-page navigation is something I don't use that much, so it's not something I notice.