QuirkeyBlogEst. 2005

I’ve been a faithful Camino user since it was in Beta, and abandoned all other browsers (except for testing) a number of months ago. Lately though, Camino has been causing me more grief then joy. Here are the biggest problems I’ve been having:

1) Keychain support – As far as I can tell, Camino only stores one keychain entry per domain/host. This is fine for most of the time, but as a web developer there are some domains, particularly one where I’m an admin or have multiple apps installed where multiple keychain entries are completely necessary. For example, I’ll have one user/pass for domain.com/admin and another for domain.com/mysqladmin and another for domain.com/wordpress. In Safari and Firefox these keychain entries are all stored separately with the full URL path as the entry name. In Camino, I can only store one user/pass and basically have to pick which I should let the browser remember, and try to remember myself not to overwrite it.

2) Downloads Pane – after the 1.02 build every-time I download something, Camino freezes up until the download has sufficiently started and been added to the Downloads pane. This is a real hassle when trying to download many or large files.

3) Javascript support – This could be an issue with the Gecko engine and unfortunately I don’t have benchmarks to prove it, but heavy client side javascript seems much much much faster in every other browser. As this becomes more common, Camino has become to seem a lot more sluggish in general.

In light of all of this, I’ve moved my default browser back to Safari. This makes me especially excited because of the recent release of Inquisitor 3 – which is just plain SWEET looking, besides working a lot better.

UPDATE

I sent these issues to Camino Feedback and got a very quick response to these three points which I’m posting below:

1) This is a limitation of the older Keychain APIs we’re using (it was all that was available when our keychain support was written). They’re currently in the process of being re-written.

2) I’m guessing that you’re using Quicksilver, which is indexing the desktop, and you’re downloading to the desktop. A fix is being written, but in the mean time, there are several workarounds:

1. Don’t have QS index the desktop
2. Don’t download to the desktop
3. Keep your downloads list short

3) Yeah, there are a couple of open JS-related performance bugs.

Thanks, Stridey! I’ll definitely come back to Camino soon – I promise.

Posted November 13th, 2006 in Geekery, Mac
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