whatever happened, happened

I gave the recently released Camino 2.0 a try today, wondering if it could make me want to switch from my beloved WebKit Nightly. 

The Good

Camino is fast. Way faster than Firefox. And obviously feels much more Mac-like than Firefox since it’s indeed a native Cocoa application. Camino seems even more lightweight in term of resource hogging compared to WebKit (I am not quite sure about this, so take it with a grain of salt).

My transition from WebKit to Camino went well. Camino’s bookmark importer quickly gave me access to all frequently visited sites (i.e. time wasters) and its keychain support made all of my logins available for use. A visit to Pimp My Camino revealed a nice gem: CookieThief - a companion app that helped me copy 20,000+ cookies from WebKit to Camino in a few seconds. No need to do all the boring login stuff again.

Camino has ad blocking and Flash blocking built right in - I didn’t have to mess around with SIMBL and Safari AdBlock and ClickToFlash (a big plus).

Things that Camino has while WebKit hasn’t (yet):

• Access to recently closed tabs
• Tab overview (sort of Exposé for tabs)
• Search right from address bar (great time saver)
• Multiple search engines support (and ability to add more)
• Growl integration for download notifications
• View source code of a web page in a separate tab, with line wrapping.
• Theme support

The Bad

No love for web developers. Has nothing like Firebug or Web Inspector.

No search query suggestions (didn’t realize how much I have grown to love this feature until I couldn’t find it in Camino). 

No inline PDF viewer (big drawback here). 

No support for Firefox extensions mean I couldn’t get my favorite userscripts to run (at least WebKit has limited Greasemonkey support thanks to Greasekit).

No Dictionary support. ⌘⌃D doesn’t work.

No key bindings support.

Scored only 72/100 in the Acid3 Test.

Verdict

For those only looking for a fast, stable and standard-compliant day-to-day web browser (that’s me!), Camino 2.0 is definitely worth a look at. For those can’t stand a day without Firefox’s slew of extensions, you may want to look somewhere else.