Skye's Blog of Doom

I love Firefox but on my Powerbook G4 with only 768MB of memory and lots and lots of tabs open, it's not exactly a speed demon. I'm trying out Camino now, which is also based on the Mozilla codebase and Gecko rendering engine but with a true Cocoa interface instead of the slow cross platform XUL that Firefox uses. It also uses standard Mac keychain access for storing your saved passwords and all the other nice integrated OS X features I've come to love, including Cocoa Gestures and various input managers.

On the minus side, that means all the wonderful Firefox extensions that use XUL aren't available, but a lot of the essentials such as a session saver and Flash blocker are available at PimpMyCamino. The CamiTools are great and CamiScript, which adds Applescript support, seems really powerful. I did have to do the chrome.rdf hack to get CamiFlash to work properly, essential as a lot of Flash sites like Yahoo Finance drive up the CPU usage to 100%.

Another extension I'm trying out is the shareware Inquisitor which adds live predictive searching to Camino and Safari. This replaces the current search bar functionality with a fast live-search style drop down. Start typing your search, and the list appears with possible queries. The registration nag is kind of annoying but it's actually quite handy! What I'm looking for often appears in the drop down, saving me a click on the Google or Yahoo search results page. Since I search about a bajillion times a day, it adds up.

So far I'm loving it and it is a LOT faster and uses a lot less memory. I've been using it for about a week and haven't opened Firefox once, so that's a good sign!