Building the Best Browser 3 Comments »

I’ve been an avid reader of Khoi Vinh’s blog since I first came across it (have I ever mentioned how beautiful it is?). His latest post hits home more than ever as he works to Build a Better Browser.

Khoi lists out 10 features (in order of importance) which his ideal browser would have. I’d like to address his comments with regards to Camino; where we are and where we’re headed.

1. “Safari’s General Stability” – I don’t have to tell Camino users that we’re there. I’d waiger that Camino is far more stable than Safari. Even now, I can crash Safari in a matter of minutes during normal browsing, yet Camino has remained in use as my primary browser for six days now, never crashing and never failing. I’ll admit I’m using adblocking and pop-up blocking, but nowadays, who isn’t?
2. “Safari’s Fit and Finish” – It’s true that Safari is a very Mac-like app. It was made by the mothership, after all. However, I’d argue that it is actually less Mac-like than Camino. Without going too much into the metal vs. aqua argument, Safari, without modifications, feels dark and overbearing (though if you like that, you can modify Camino’s interface to your liking). It’s quick, but it’s interface sometimes feels slow. In addition, keyboard shortcuts make little sense in many occasions.
3. “OmniWeb’s Visual Tabs” – This is a hard one for me. I’ve never really used the visual tabs in OmniWeb, but I can’t say I like the idea of them. There currently isn’t a bug filed to implement this in Camino and, frankly, I’m sure the demand is high enough. What advantages does this truly have? We did, after all, already remove the drawer from Camino.
4. “Firefox’s Cross-platform Consistency” – Thanks to the Gecko rendering engine, from Mozilla, on which Camino is built, we do this. Camino supports all the technologies of Mozilla Gecko 1.8 except MathML. That means pages should look the same in Camino as they do in Firefox (unless a site is improperly sniffing UAs).
5. “Safari’s Speed” – Heh… I almost laughed at this until I read “…of the three browsers”. If Khoi includes Camino in his next review, he might have change this section as there is very little disagreement about Camino’s speed. We’re a true “one bounce” app.
6. “Safari’s Private Browsing” – Not that I’d ever use this… because I only browse highly respectable sites, but I hear it’s a nice feature to have. Camino has a bug on it and hopefully that’ll be something that gets done in the 1.1/1.2 timeframe (though right now it’s futured).
7. “Firefox’s Extensibility” – Yeah yeah… we know. Depsite a few add-ons, Camino isn’t nearly as extensible as Firefox. Nor will we be.
8. “OmniWeb’s Text Entry Fields” – I actually hadn’t heard of this, but it certainly sounds like a great concept. There are numerous times this would come in handy for me. Maybe for 2.0?
9. “OmniWeb’s Live Editing of Source Code” – This is similar to Greasemonkey for Firefox. Greasemonkey, of course, isn’t portable to Camino due to it’s heavy use of XUL for the interface. Something like this is possible, but not easily done.
10. “OmniWeb’s Site-specific Preferences and Ad Blocking” – I happen to like our current adblocking. Not too overbearing, but picks up 90% of ads I run across. Site specific adblocking and preferences (possible through userContent.css and hostperm files) would be a welcome addition. There are Gecko bugs which block this concept, however (at least the “on the fly” part). Hopefully we’ll get there.

In the end, we meet several of the requirements Khoi has (at least in my mind). What’s left are feature enhancements, most of which are on the “planned” list, but others are still beind debated. (1, 2, 4, and 5 are easily met with 6 planned.)

How long until we get there? What other features will be implemented? Well, that depends on how much you’re willing to help. Welcome to open source…