Camino 0.8.1 out… and boy is it fast

I read that Camino 0.8.1 was released on Mozillazine the other day and decided to try it out. After using it for a few days, I can report a few things.

First, it’s a huge improvement over past versions of Camino (although I think I’m probably referring to the Chimera versions). I first tried Chimera in the days before Firefox, er, Firebird, er, Phoenix, became stable, and at the time, it suffered from weird rendering bugs and intermittent crashes. No more.

Second, it’s fast. Really, really fast. Up to this point, Firefox has been my primary browser. Safari was only fired up when I needed to test a website, or needed to log in to a site as two different users, simultaneously. And every time I fired up Safari, I was a little jealous of it’s performance. Firefox isn’t a dog, exactly, but it is, well, pokey. You know, not so slow that it really pisses you off, but slow enough to notice when compared to other, better performers. That’s one problem Camino definitly doesn’t have.

Finally, Camino puts a close button for every tab on the tab label, exactly where it should be.

Of course, you can’t have it all. MozCC doesn’t work with Camino, since Camino replaces the XUL front end with a native, Cocoa front end. So even though it’s a great performer, there doesn’t seem to be any analogous extension mechanism. Even so, it’s enough of a difference to make me change my behavior. Until Firefox catches up, that is.