I have been asked a few times about my preferred web browser. I used to say ¡°Safari¡±; lately I¡¯ve been saying, ¡°Camino.¡± I never said Firefox.

I have nothing against Firefox, except that I can¡¯t stand the fact that the buttons and boxes and other such ephemera look like Windows. I honestly can¡¯t stand to look at that. I do recognize, however, their are many themes available, but I never found one that eliminated all of its Windows window-dressing.

As soon as Apple released Safari, I rejoiced and dumped Internet Explorer (see my previous article, ¡°What¡¯s In A Name?¡±) in about one second flat. But lately ¡ª within the last six months or so ¡ª Safari has been plagued with the dreaded spinning beach ball, and has often refused to quit. I have yet to figure out why, but I do not have the patience of Job.

So I have been using Camino 98% of the time of late. I like the smooth, clean interface; in a very strange way, it just feels ¡°lighter¡± than either Safari or Firefox. I appreciate that Camino does not use the ¡°brushed metal¡± interface, which I don¡¯t care for (although after using a small utility called ¡°UNI¡± to eliminate ¡°brushed metal¡± from my system entirely, I switched back because I actually missed it).

Camino does not, as yet, support RSS, but since abandoning Safari, I can¡¯t say that I have missed it. I¡¯m sure that a future release will include it. There are a few video sites that don¡¯t render properly, although I think most of those are WMP videos which I¡¯m guessing aren¡¯t loading correctly under Flip4Mac. After about two days, I stopped caring.

I mean no offense to the partisans of either Safari or Firefox (although admittedly I do mean offense to any remaining Internet Explorer fans out there, all one of you). I happen to think that Camino has a lot going for it, and I think it¡¯s just going to get better and better.