Last month, I tried out three major browsers for the Mac, and declared that Apple's Safari would keep its place of honor in my Dock. This month I examined three less-well-known browsers. Camino 0.8.1 and Firefox 0.9.3 are both from the Mozilla open-source group. Both are prerelease software, and both are free to use. OmniWeb 5.0.1, from the Omni Group, costs $29 but can be tried for free for 30 days.

In my informal speed tests, Camino came out on top, loading the Nike Running USA page in just 10 seconds; Firefox took 12 seconds; OmniWeb took 16 seconds. The fastest browser from my big three, Safari, took 13 seconds to load the page in this Internet session.

Interface

One of Camino's nice features is the option to prevent sites from changing the appearance of your browser. It also has a Send Link command that opens your e-mail client and puts the link to the Web page you're looking at into the message body. Another nifty trick of Camino's is "Find as You Type," which lets you search a page for a word or phrase, just by clicking on the page (not the URL bar), typing a forward slash, then typing the text you want to see.

Camino was written for OS X, but has features very similar to those in Firefox. Both are good-looking, easy-to-use browsers that have it all over Internet Explorer and compare favorably to Safari. And the features of both can be extended with plug-ins. But they don't offer anything that you can't get in a Windows browser.

OmniWeb, a Mac-only browser, has lots of cool features, such as a built-in spelling checker, bookmarks that you can filter, and bookmarks for RSS news feeds. One of my favorites is the small set of icons in the status bar that give you one-click access to tools for the page, such as viewing all the cookies sent by that site, viewing a pop-up you want to see (assuming you've blocked all pop-ups), or using AutoFill. My other favorite is the Site Preferences button, which is front and center on the menu bar. It lets you set security, appearance, and other preferences for sites individually as you're browsing. This is much more convenient than drilling down into the Preferences menu, especially since less savvy users probably don't realize that they can customize how individual sites behave. I have yet to see a Windows browser with either of these interface enhancements.

Privacy and Security

All three browsers block pop-ups, and all three let you "whitelist" sites--meaning that you can allow specific sites to deliver pop-ups. With Camino, the first time you encounter a pop-up, a dialog box gives you the option to block all of them. You can change your choice through the Preferences menu.

On the downside, Camino hides the history- and cache-clearing buttons on a sub-submenu within Preferences--and they're within the Navigation menu, not Security or Privacy, as you might guess. I couldn't find any command that let me cover my browsing tracks with a quick click.

OmniWeb has a Flush Cache command in the OmniWeb menu that's similar to Safari's Reset Safari command. While you do have to dig down into Preferences to clear the History, it has its own submenu--no digging needed.

Annoyingly, even when I requested that Firefox not warn me about moving from an encrypted to an unencrypted page, it continued to pop up the dialog box.

Tabbed Browsing/Navigation

Camino and Firefox have the same kind of tabbed interface that Safari and Navigator do; that is, when you Cmd-click a link, a new page opens, and your other open page appears as a tab in a narrow horizontal bar at the top of the window. Firefox handled this predictably, with no glitches, but Camino was persnickety. It opened a slew of windows for me, but didn't display the tab bar consistently.

In OmniWeb, tabbed browsing takes form of a slide-out subwindow (or drawer) that holds browsable thumbnails of your pages, which can also be reordered. I'm not a big fan of drawers, but they do let you quickly scan all the items they hold. And the vertical drawer would hold many more links than a horizontal tab bar--I'm sure that's helpful to multitasking fanatics. Given that drawers are an increasingly common UI device on the Mac, I suppose I'd better get used to them. One thing I wanted to do in OmniWeb was to type an address into the URL bar and have the resulting page open in a new tab, but I couldn't figure out how to do this in a few minutes of fiddling.

Still the Winner?

The Omni Group has been creative in developing ways to make Web browsing more secure and convenient. I'm pretty enamored of OmniWeb, so I think I'll let it coexist with Safari for awhile. I have a feeling it will earn a permanent spot on the Dock.

IMac News

You may know by now that Apple announced two new IMac models at the end of August. Not only do they have IBM G5 processors inside, but they have also been radically redesigned again. This time, the entire computer is concealed behind an LCD monitor, the whole package resembling Apple's new LCD monitors. The new 17- and 20-inch all-in-ones are slated to be on sale in mid-September; look for a complete PC World review in the near future.

My first impression (based on photos alone), is that Apple has traded in the ability to customize the display height for a sleeker, more conventional look, which may sell more systems but ultimately doesn't serve users' ergonomic needs. There's only a $600 difference in price between the $1899 20-inch IMac and the $1299, 20-inch Cinema Display. Does this mean the whole computer part of the IMac costs only $600? Does the IMac use a less-expensive and lower-grade LCD than the Cinema Display? It would be interesting to look at the two side by side and compare the image quality.

Comments or questions? Drop a line to The Mac Skeptic.