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Sorry Camino, I Went Back To My Ex-Browser's Edgy Twin
Written By Mike on Dec. 20, 2007.
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I switched from Safari to Camino about 6-8 months ago, mainly because I was dissatisfied with its speed in loading pages and lack of CSS styling of form elements. I moved to Camino and was certainly happy. Camino uses the Gecko rendering engine from Firefox but has a more Mac-like look and feel, so I thought it was a good marriage of those two qualities.
Recently though Camino has been acting up for me. After having it open for a few hours it will randomly stop loading pages or CSS files, and when I click on links it'll just sit there and do nothing. This is fixed after an application restart, but it's still annoying. However yesterday and today it's sporadically stopped loading pages altogether or it takes more than 10 seconds to start the page load. This only happens 1 every 50 pages I visit, but on one occasion my web connection was fine but Camino refused to load any pages. I restarted the application but continued to have the same problem until I restarted my Mac (Safari viewed pages fine.) In addition this, Camino also suffers from memory leaks like its big brother Firefox, but not as pronounced.
What spurred my renewed interest in Safari was this post over at Webkit, the open source rendering engine that is built into Mac OS X. They just developed a new Javascript benchmark test and asked people to run the test on their own computers, using various browsers, and post the results. I restarted Camino (to get fresh memory, not sure if that's even a technical possibility but whatever) and ran the test in 11.1 seconds. Then I ran it in Safari (3.0.4) and it took 8.8 seconds. Safari beat it.
I scrolled down a bit and started reading other people's comments on speed, and one person got similar results as mine but then ran it against the nightly build of WebKit which has all the latest web rendering gadgetry that the WebKit team has been working on. On my system, the nightly build of WebKit completed the test in 3.7 seconds!
After using the nightly build for a bit, I realized it's much quicker than Camino in rendering pages so I decided to give it a shot. I exported my bookmarks from Camino (File -> Export Bookmarks) and imported them into Safari (File -> Import Bookmarks) and things worked out great. The only thing I miss is all the URLs stored in my Camino history for quick access while typing, but I'm sure after a few days of usage the WebKit nightly will be good to go in that regard.
One thing that excited me was that Safari (and the WebKit nightly) both allow you to use CSS to style form elements now! I'm not sure where my brain was when that feature was released but there's no real reason not to use WebKit now as my main browser. I made the switch and I'm pretty happy right now.
Rich
Written Dec. 20, 2007 / Report /
Mike, a millisecond (ms) is a thousandth of a second, not a hundredth.
The first WebKit nightly time I saw in that list was 3861.2ms, which is nearer 4 seconds than 37 seconds. I suggest you re-run your numbers. Because 88 seconds is abysmal — I'm assuming you got somewhere in the region of 8,800ms, right? That makes for 8.8 seconds, not 88.
I got 15,552ms (15.5 seconds) in Camino, for what it's worth. On a MacBook with only 512mb RAM, without bothering to close "extraneous" apps or restart the browser after having it open for over 24 hours. (And I've experienced none of the problems you describe, Mike.)
RightOn
Written Dec. 20, 2007 / Report /
I haven't used WebKit in a while, so bear with the stupid question.
When you install it, does it replace the back end of Safari or is it its own App?
Mike
Written Dec. 20, 2007 / Report /
Whoops, sorry for the conversion goof. Yup I got 11.1 in Camino, 8.8 in Safari, and 3.7 seconds for Webkit.
It's its own application, so you could run WebKit and Safari at the same time if you wanted.
RightOn
Written Dec. 20, 2007 / Report /
Any way to make Safari run it?
Mike
Written Dec. 20, 2007 / Report /
Run what James?
RightOn
Written Dec. 20, 2007 / Report /
Well I assume Safari runs on the WebKit framework so wouldn't there be a way to replace the one for Safari with this?
Mike
Written Dec. 20, 2007 / Report /
Probably, but there's little outside of WebKit that Safari actually has that's different between the two. All the features of one are inside the other, except the nightly has a different rendering engine.
computerjoe
Written Dec. 23, 2007 / Report /
Why not just use Firefox?
alexsuraci
Written Dec. 23, 2007 / Report /
Firefox is almost there with FF3, I'd use it as my main browser if not for the fact that it broke jQuery (something that will be fixed upon FF3 final apparently), so I can't test with it.
Anything before FF3 just isn't worth it in my eyes, the interface is so god-awful and clunky. Proto (FF3's upcoming Mac theme) is trying to solve that but fails with the subtleties, such as the back/forward buttons.
Mike
Written Dec. 23, 2007 / Report /
computerjoe: FF has far worse memory problems than Camino, and (up until FF3) the interface was very un-Mac like, aka, ugly. At least that's my opinion.
Ozone42
Written Dec. 23, 2007 / Report /
Firefox is also the slowest render of the three for me. Camino has a slight edge, maybe due to it's lower memory usage. I would expect them to be about the same. Safari blows them both away.
Griffith
Written Dec. 24, 2007 / Report /
I found Firefox on the Mac to be, at the very least, acceptable, in terms of look. But obviously it wasn't made with Macs in mind, so I understand your perspective. Most native Mac applications put it to shame.
alexsuraci
Written Dec. 24, 2007 / Report /
I managed to get FF3 looking decent by modding Proto's back/forward buttons: