Camino and non-standard text input
Posted by Pierre Igot in: MacintoshOctober 7th, 2003 • 4:40 pm
I still use Camino for a number of web-related tasks, including posting new blog entries. (Safari has a tendency to crash after a while when I use it to access the pMachine control panel. Apple say that they are aware of the issue…)
But I really don’t like the fact that text input in web forms doesn’t quite work right in Camino. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what is wrong, but I remember that, at some point, interactive shorthand expansion with Spell Catcher X simply would not work right in Chimera/Camino. At the time, I discussed this extensively with Spell Catcher’s author, and we were able to determine that the problem was that Chimera was using non-standard fields for text input. The only thing that he could suggest was to write to the Chimera/Camino developers and let them know.
Now, things seem to have got better in more recent versions. But I still get the feeling that things don’t work quite right. For example, I frequently have to SELECT lines or paragraphs of text in TEXTAREA fields, and I often get strange screen artifacts and unpredictable behavior.
It’s too bad, because Camino is a fairly good browser, and is often a bit faster than Safari for loading pages with my pokey dial-up connection.
October 8th, 2003 at Oct 08, 03 | 12:33 am
Well, from a user’s point of view (i.e. my point of view), there is no acceptable reason for not using Mac OS X’s built-in controls. I realize that Mozilla might have to use cross-platform tools in order to maintain the cross-platform status of the whole project, but as a user I cannot agree with this approach. It’s for that very reason that I simply cannot use Netscape for Mac OS X and its many proprietary controls.
Camino is great in that it makes full use of Mac OS X’s built-in technology. From my point of view, this should extend to text areas as well. I realize it might be too demanding for a product that’s free and whose main source of financial support has recently been shut off, but these are circumstances that fall outside my area of expertise.
October 7th, 2003 at Oct 07, 03 | 11:39 pm
Yes – it’s true. Camino uses mozilla’s cross-platform text widget for text areas, rather than use a Cocoa or Carbon supplied text field. Mozilla’s text widgets used to be absolutely horrible on the Mac, but after months of work they’re now just not that good.
Any help in writing better code would be appreciated.