Last week, I vowed that I’d give Camino a week. I’ll be giving it a lot more than that. I’d had issues with Camino 1.5 back in June, but it works just fine now.

Things I like:

• Speed. Oh my, I didn’t realize how sluggish Firefox on my Mac was being until I switched. [Note: my iBook doesn't struggle as much, because it has 50% more RAM.]
• Mac-iness. Like everyone else, I recognize that Firefox-on-Mac is not Mac-native feeling. This really doesn’t bother me much, because I spend ~40% of my computing time on PCs at the office. But there are little Mac things that Camino does that Firefox-on-Mac doesn’t. Mainly, it revolves around using Gecko with OS X GUI goodness, rather than relying on XUL and then having a XUL-to-Mac-GUI abstraction layer. If you’re thinking, “Oooooh, abstraction layers, no wonder it’s slow,” well, yes. And it’s also non-Mac.
• Minimalism. I’m glad that I can’t glom everything onto it. Having been on Facebook since before Applications turned some users’ Facebook pages into MySpace-on-white-bread, I can appreciate minimalism. [Note: the users most likely to have 47 Facebook Applications installed were people who used MySpace before they used Facebook hardcore. When you don't know better, you want the kitchen sink.]

What I don’t like:

• The lack of a home button/the funky home keyboard shortcut. Shift-Cmd-H? Really?
• The lack of a keyboard shortcut to take me to the search area.
• Furthermore, I miss the extensibility of multiple search engines—and yes, I know I can add them, but the process of adding them is such a pain in the ass. One thing I love about Firefox is Mycroft, which allows you dozens of site-specific search engine access points. There are a handful of sites [Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, IMDb] where I find these things very useful, and I miss them on the Mac.
• No Ctrl-Tab rotating through tabs.
• Firefox’s Cmd-Return shortcut for taking “cnn” in the address bar and making it “www.cnn.com”.

Camino is going to be my main Mac browser for the next little while. Firefox could win me back with better performance [unlikely, given the bloated nature of the FF codebase], or maybe going to a faster Mac in the late fall will help things. Not sure. But for now, me and Camino are good.