Camino 0.8(b)

Mozilla Foundation
Rating:@@

Camino 0.7 was nice. Yes, it takes quite a lot more disk space than Safari, and it takes longer to start up (especially with that 300 kilobloat splash screen), but it was nice. The toolbar icons were a bit repetitive, but they were nice too. At times the quirks of Safari can become too much, and it's nice to switch for a while to a more mature surfing tool.

The appearance of Camino 0.8 may shock a few people. Teletubbie icons on the toolbar. A predilection for spring green (or is it metallic chartreuse) alongside Aqua blue. And an obvious hankering to ape a lot of the features Safari started with.

Such as the twirling 'progress wheels' in the tabs of opening pages and the little 'x's that go in there so you can close said tabs (although they will not appear until the pages are fully loaded, so Safari wins a point here on functionality).

And the documentation says you will need 30 MB of disk space, but we got it down to 18 MB easily (which is 3 MB less than with 0.7) but even counting the WebKit Safari is much smaller. Safari's executable is about 700 KB; the WebKit's executable is about the same; but Camino's executable is about 12 MB - over 15 times as large.

Which explains why things take so long to load...

And there are things wrong that they shouldn't have tried to fix. They've coined a new way of scrolling - by pixel rather than by rendered page: there's something fishy afoot, and it can affect your system afterwards too. Not good.