Camino review

Not everyone cares which web browser they use and, for most people, Safari does everything required.

However, if you do spend a lot of time on the web, you're more likely to start forming opinions about browsers and developing a taste for one over the others. If this sounds like you, Camino is worthy of your attention. After four years' development by a team of volunteers, it has come out of beta as a confident, dependable solution for day-to-day web browsing.

Camino started life as yet another offshoot of the Mozilla project, which took open-source code from the ancient Netscape browser and began fine-tuning it. Camino's developers kept the insides (the Gecko page rendering code in particular, now at version 1.8) and wrapped them in a shiny new Cocoa skin. They wanted to create a native Mac browser, not a port.

The 1.0 release is a mark of the team's dedication to quality. Camino, like all the best Mac technologies, just works - and does so with understated style. The user interface itself is one of the best you can find on Mac OS X; attractively designed and decently responsive. New features include sortable (and Spotlight-friendly) bookmarks, a much-improved form filler, live history search, and built-in ad blocking. It's also a Universal Binary.

With its focus on browsing, Camino lacks some of the features that have almost become standard elsewhere. There's no built-in means of saving a browsing session when quitting (although the third-party CamiTools preference pane adds this), nor is there support for recognising or reading RSS feeds, although this feature is expected to be added very soon.

You can, however, depend on Camino. Open multiple tabs and it will hardly complain; leave them open for days and it will happily continue where you left off your browsing session.

Camino ditched the XUL interface that eventually became the cross-platform Firefox browser, so it's not compatible with the add-ons and extensions that have made Firefox uniquely customisable. But don't let that put you off: Camino's shortfalls are outweighed by its speed and reliability. This is an excellent browser and a perfect example of how open-source software can compete with the rest.