Kyle D. Skrinak

I’d love for this post to be a painstakingly methodical and thorough comparison between the two; but it ain’t. The skinny: Camino is very unsexy. Few extensions, widget and rich text rendering is problematic, text insertion doesn’t always map correctly. Yet, it is “fast” (quick to load and open a page) and, using Gecko rendering, the second most targeted browser spec for page rendering (IE being # 1, of course) so I don’t have too many “wigged out” pages, such as overlapping text objects. Also critically important, Camino maintains a svelte memory usage over a long period of time. Just because I can afford to run FF doesn’t mean that I want to be sloppy with my resource allotment.

Firefox is my favorite on ubuntu; oddly, konqueror, while fast, has similar rendering issues as Safari does. Not reliable enough to keep running. An open-source parallel to the Mac platform, I suppose.

WebKit (usually updated nightly) IS fast and pretty, but rendering isn’t as reliable as it is with Gecko-based browsers. I’ve heard that Epiphany is adopting webkit. Should be interesting to see what happens.

Like an ugly but ever-faithful mutt, Camino is always the browser that I want to leave but end up coming back to.