My Life as Open Source

What makes the best browser?

In my opinion, Fast Loading, Highly Configurable, Tabbed Browsing, Tabbed Bookmarks, Preferably Skinnable, Stable open source (free), active development with lively solid user community.

FAST is my main requirement, I have found Camino to be the fastest Mac browser, with FireFox second, but it is not near as peppy as Camino. Camino is a simple Gecko-based browser written in Cocoa, which gives it the OS X look and feel (no brushed metal, thank god) and makes it integrate nicely with OS X services like Keychain.

I use Camino on a daily basis and have found it to be the best for me. IE has been gone off my Mac for years, Safari is on but I don’t use it much, it has great features but it’s not the fastest browser, I’m really hoping that there will be major improvements in 2.0 that’s coming with Tiger, but we’ll see. The only thing I don’t use Camino for is pages requiring Flash - for some reason Flash animations are slow on Camino, so I use Safari for those.

However, I find Camino/Safari/FireFox starting to exhibit the spinning beachball with painfully long delays under two or more of the following circumstances:
1) long uptime (several days)
2) lots of tabbed windows (16+ tabs, 3+ windows)
3) lots of window thrashing, i.e., starting tabs for tons of links and bouncing back and forth between them
4) frequent refreshing, especially of auction pages

Activity Monitor shows scant free memory on my system. My solution has been to quit and relaunch browser. Free memory goes up considerably and the browser is once again responsive. None of them cope with such “stresses” environment.

Anyway, I recommend Camino for better and faster web experience.