Betalogue

While I still occasionally have to launch Internet Explorer in ORDER to be able to access a web site that simply will not work in Safari and is obviously designed in a Windows-centric, Microsoft-infested kind of way, I do the vast majority of my web browsing with Safari. It’s fast, it’s tight, it’s well designed, it rarely crashes. What else could you ask for?

Before Safari came out, I had already started to switch from Explorer to the Mozilla project then known as “Chimera” and now known as Camino. Once Safari was there, I more or less forgot about Chimera. While it was a nice Cocoa application, it simply wasn’t as tight and elegant as Safari.

These days, however, I am “rediscovering” Camino. There are several reasons. One of them is that an increasing number of sites (among the ones that I am interested in) advertise their support of Mozilla and other browsers derived from it, including Camino. Safari is already well supported by a great number of sites, but it’s a 1.0 product, and its compliance with Internet standards is not exactly optimal yet. Camino seems to be a bit better that this. A simple example: the font variant “small-caps” (which I use for the category label that appears between brackets and in grey next to each item’s title in this blog) is simply not supported in Safari — whereas it is supported in both Explorer and Camino.

Another reason is that it’s always nice to have two browsers running at the same time. Browser crashes are unfortunately a fact of life — and, until somebody finally comes up with a smart “snapshot” feature that periodically takes a snapshot of which web pages are currently loaded in your browser and is able to restore your environment of web pages after a browser crash with a single click, HAVING a secondary browser for loading certain pages is always a bonus. I do this especially for web sites that I am not familiar with and have not yet downloaded in Safari, or with web sites that I know and that tend to induce crashes. You just never know when a crash might happen. So I LOAD the offending or suspicious web site in Camino, leaving my environment in Safari untouched — and, if the web site turns out to be reasonably well-designed, I can then decide to store its URL as a “.webloc” file in my “Bookmarks” folder and access it from within Safari (my default browser for .webloc files) later on.

I still don’t like the way that Camino handles tabs within windows as much as the Safari approach — but it’s very similar and keyboard shortcuts are by and large identical. (I’d like each tab to have its own “Close” box, for example.) So it’s not too much disruption to switch from Safari to Camino and back.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Monday, August 11th, 2003 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.