What are the advantages of the "Camino" web browser for Mac OS?

Camino uses the same web engine as Firefox. That means some websites that don’t work on Safari (e.g., Gmail) will work in Camino. But Camino is built from the ground up to run on the Mac, so it feels a bit faster than Firefox and behaves more like a Mac app (for example, you can press “up” in a text box to go to the beginning.)

Camino runs better than Firefox for me, except that it doesn’t work with Firefox plugins.

How is Safari not compatible w Gmail? I could use the tip.

gmail works fine on safari for me

I think there a bunch of functions that don’t work on Safari, if I remember correctly… you can’t compose HTML emails on Safari. (Though, again, this is from my memory).

At this particular moment I think the only broken feature is Google Chat from within Gmail. That feature doesn’t exist in Safari. Rich text formatting works in both, and support for Safari does get added to most of the feature—but sometimes the other browsers get those features before Safari does.

I think of Camino as a lightweight kid-brother to Firefox. It’s smaller than Firefox (in terms of the number of hamsters required to run it), faster, and a little more Mac looking, without all of the brushed-metal wrappings of Safari.

Camino hasn’t yet learned to play as well in the world as Firefox; it doesn’t have an army of open-source acolytes building plugins for it, so if you’re addicted to FoxyTunes or your del.icio.us browser buttons, Camino will make you sad. Camino also lacks some key Firefox conveniences, like single-button closures on browser tabs. (This may have changed since the last time I used it).

Camino renders some pages better than Safari does—or at least with fewer Mac-centricities (for example, fonts that look fuzzy on Safari look crisp on Camino).