Nice post. Have based your post in (link)

Great to see that Samuel Sidler is taking time to help users out in this thread of comments.

(link)

I use it mainly becuse I can search for text using ‘/’ key. Also because, by now, my book mark panel is 5.5 lines long :)

I’m glad they are adding spell check, although I should’ve known that I can use OSX’s spell check (hey I’m still new to the Mac)

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pwd: This question comes up often and the answer is always “no”. Firefox for Mac will [probably] always have a XUL interface (see Simon’s comment above), which doesn’t look, feel, or act in the same way a standard Cocoa interface does. Dave Hyatt, the original creator of Camino (then Chimera) and one of the original creators of Firefox (then, Phoenix), said it best:

“Let 100 browsers bloom. Let 100 schools of thought contend.”

We all have different ideas and follow different paths. Why should we all use the same browser? :)

Firefox is nice on the Mac, but Camino shows (at least to me) how important a simple user experience is-Camino just fits into using OS X so nicely, even better in some ways than Safari.

Now, if only they could get BugmeNot as a right-click…;)

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Stephen, yes all other apps can use a spell checker… well… except Firefox (until 2.0) and Camino (until 1.1). This was a limitation in both browsers due to the core functions. I’ll note, however, that Firefox ships with its own dictionary. Camino, however, uses the Mac OS X one.

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Frank, just to address your points…

1 was done for both our users and third party developers who wanted a resizable search bar. There was no other way to give them a resizable search bar.

I haven’t seen #2, but it’s most definitely something that’ll be fixed in Camino 2.0, our release that will be built on the same rendering engine as Firefox 3 (Gecko 1.9) which includes major back-end improvements. You’ll see those improvements in Camino, Firefox, SeaMonkey, and any other browser that chooses to use Gecko.

3 is an issue you’re seeing because you use the Flip4Mac plugin to play your Window Media. The issue stems from our interaction with the plugin (and visa versa). For some time, we’ve been trying to work with them to solve this — and they’ve been trying to work with us — but we keep missing each other. Again, with all the changes in Gecko 1.9, this is looking like it’ll be vastly improved for Camino 2.0.

you are right. i was wrong. it is the latest alpha build and not the nightly. apologies for misleading you and the readers, and please “virtual” spank me for my error.

On the other topics, I have not experienced any problems with the browser, and even as an alpha it has worked flawlessly, and as I said, the spell checker is my savior. I am loving it.

On the You Tube, frankly I have not tested that because I don’t go to youtube that much. The NewTeeVee crew does that, and I will check.

I agree, lot of work to be done on the browser, but the team is working hard on it. Well hopefully more people can send them feedback.

I just forwarded your comments to them as well.

On the mistake, hope you will forgive me this once :-)

Man, I really love your blog, but sometimes brother, your information is wrong. Let’s be clear:

THERE IS NO NIGHTLY BUILD OF CAMINO 1.1 ALPHA 2

For you to write and link to the beta page as if it’s the nightly build page is just wrong and misleading to your readers. No where on the Camino beta is there a reference to a nightly build of the 1.1 Alpha 1 or Alpha 2 release. Those were one time only releases to prepare for the eventual release of the beta.

On top of that, Camino 1.1 Alpha 2 is by no means perfect. In my mind, it is actually a step backwards from the achievements that they made with Camino 1.0.3:

1) Whose bright idea was it to chain the address bar and the search bar together? That’s just idiotic and one of the reasons that I don’t use Safari. I should be able to customize the toolbar and place each section where ever I’d like them to be.

2)For some reason, Camino 1.1 acts horrible whenever there is Flash embedded on a webpage. And it’s not really noticeable until you end up on a page where there is more than two Flash movies embedded on a page. Because of this, YouTube surfing in the Alpha has pretty much become non-existant.

3)A really bad bug that I’ve come across is that sometimes text, whether in a text box or on a page, becomes unselectable and begins to disappear. This also sometimes has the effect of making an entire page disappear. Very, very bad.

To be fair, there ARE a lot of great improvements. The native sensing of RSS feeds in a page is great. And yes, Spellcheck has helped me many a time as well. But their still needs to be serious work done. I’m sure that the developers are doing the best job that they can with the resources that they have available (and believe me if i knew Cocoa, I would be trying to help), but I think that it might be a while before we can see a stable, useable 1.1 beta released.

Phil