I've switched from Firefox to Camino (OS X) Monday, June 11, 2007

I've recently switched my primary browser from Firefox to Camino for OS X. It's got the same rendering engine as Firefox, but the UI has been created natively for OS X rather than in the cross platform XUL. The downside is you don't get all the same plug ins which depend on XUL, but the upside is you get the rendering reliability of Firefox, with the speed of Safari.

I realized I wear two hats when I'm online – Web developer and everyday user. When I'm in Web developer mode I usually use Firefox because I take advantage of some great developer plug ins like Web Developer toolbar, FireBug and Charles.

When I'm a regular user though, I just want to get stuff done faster, and I want my browser to securely remember some of my passwords. Firefox doesn't remember passwords securely for you. Trust me, they're easy to crack open. Safari and Camino on the other hand are more native in OS X, can take advantage of OS X's Keychain security which encrypts password information. Note, Firefox does not encrypt passwords that it stores. I'm not going to get into encryption strength, but Keychain's pretty damn good compared to no encryption.

If you want to make the switch to Camino or any other browser other than Safari as your default browser, you'll have to actually change the default setting in Safari's preferences. I think that requirement is weird and that it should be in the OS X Preferences panel like everything else, but that's another topic.