Bloggers give Camino the thumbs up

Camino 1.0, a browser that uses the Mozilla Foundation's Gecko HTML rendering engine but has been written specifically for the OS X, was released on Tuesday to a positive welcome from the blogging community.

The Camino browser was created by a community-driven project that has the backing of the Mozilla Foundation.

The Camino Project said that the application has taken "over a year of hard work by devoted volunteers", and offers a number of new features including support for additional Web standards, a new tab appearance and a pause and resume feature in the download manager.

Some in the Mac community were quick to praise Camino 1.0, saying that they are will use it instead of Apple's Safari browser or Mozilla's Firefox browser.

Jan van Iperen, who describes himself as "Apple-addicted", wrote on Thursday that he has been using Camino for less than a day but is already a fan.

"Not even using it for 24 hours, but Camino browser installing was a breeze, importing bookmarks was click click, displaying of any kind of media works splendid, browsing/scrolling is smooooooth," he wrote in his blog. "Looks like I found myself a new default browser..."

Another blogger, Daniel, posted a review of Camino 1.0, where he said that Camino beats Safari on Flash performance, had better support for cascading style sheets, and is faster and "better looking" than Firefox. He admitted that it was hard to tell after using it for just one day, but said that "for the time being" he was going to switch from Safari to Camino.

But not everyone was completely sold on Camino. Self-described 'renowned blogger' bigcomplex still prefers Safari because of features such as its download manager, but said the latest version of Camino was definitely an improvement.

"If you'd asked me a few months ago, when Camino still couldn't draw buttons properly, I'd have doubted that it could ever become my browser of choice. But now, at version 1.0, it's very, very close," bigcomplex wrote.