Camino 0.8.4 review

Camino is an open-source web browser from the Mozilla organisation, the same people that produce the highly regarded FireFox.

Camino is not as fully featured as its stablemate, but it is a fully fledged Aqua application, rather than looking like the unloved offspring of some Unix/Windows nightmare.

Development had stalled for a while around version 0.7, but the new 0.8 release has been bumped up to 0.8.4, which brings in Tiger compatibility. Of course, the greatest advantage of Camino is that it is based on the open-source Gecko rendering engine, which has been upgraded from version 1.7 to 1.7.6. Gecko is generally regarded to be faster than Apple's own WebKit (KHTML) rendering engine. However, we have to say that, with the release of Tiger, this difference is less obvious - if anything, version 0.8.4 seems a little more sluggish than before, although rendering seemed more faithful (for example, it rendered the Radio 4 home page correctly, which proved too much for Safari and Shiira). But this is pre-release software, so the situation is constantly changing (you can download nightly builds of the browser from www.camino.org).

The main purpose of Camino was to put the Gecko engine in a Mac OS wrapper, and the engineers have done a good job of this. Bookmarks now conform to Safari's full-window layout, giving you a larger playing field for managing them. Bookmark import from other browsers is also well supported. Unlike WebKit-based browsers, Camino displays all Bookmark Bar entries in multiple rows, so they are always visible.

Numerous bug fixes are included in this release: entering text in certain forum fields now behaves properly; several 'Critical Security Issues' have been fixed; the lock-up when scrolling a downloading page has been addressed; and the secure status of a page is now flagged in the address bar, so you can turn off the annoying 'You are now leaving...' dialogs.

Passwords and usernames are now autofilled using the Keychain, but that's about it: full forms autofill is not supported, which is a shame. So, Camino 0.4.4 has few rough edges, but it is definitely one to add to your browser collection.