Camino: Firefox actually made for the Mac

The Camino Project is an effort by a few dedicated individuals to take Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine and put an honest-to-goodness Mac UI on top of it. And if that isn’t enough to get you excited (perish the thought), they just reached version 1.0.

I like to use Camino if I need to access sites that are designed to work with IE/Firefox, but not necessarily Safari. (Citibank’s web site is the example that immediately springs to mind.) Unfortunately, you might see that those sites still warn you that they might not work.

This is where CamiTools comes in. It’s an add-on for Camino that does a number of nifty things, but my favorite is the ability to set the User Agent of the browser so that when the web site says to the browser, “Hey, man, who are you?” it can be all, “I’m totally Firefox 1.5 for the Mac. Like, really.” Then, the web site is like, “OK dude. Come on in.”

This is just a little white lie, really, because it should render any site as well as Firefox. I’ve had pretty good success with it. Also, I’m 99.9% sure there’s a way to set Camino to do this without using CamiTools, but it’s much easier to do it this way.

I’ve still stopped short of using Camino as my primary browser, however. To me, it seems a tad slower than Safari and I’ve actually started to use Safari’s RSS reading feature. (This is for casual time wasting only…if you try to take away my NetNewsWire I will hurt you.) Also, I had a problem in which Camino would freak out when downloading files, though it was fixed by a complete uninstall/reinstall. (Just an FYI there.)

So, give Camino a shot if you’re a Mac person but you like Firefox.