I’ve started trying out Camino. There wasn’t really a reason to other than I wanted to. I’ve always wondered if there were any real difference between Firefox and Camino. After using it for a few days, I’ve discovered a few things.

First, we’ll have a look at a little history. As we all know, Mozilla sprang forth from the ashes of Netscape. Now, people were finding the Mozilla suite a little unwieldly, so they decided to come up with a standalone browser, and they called it Phoenix. Phoenix eventually became Firebird and picked up momentum and turned into the web browser we all know and love called Firefox. At about the same time, other Mozilla devs were experimenting with Cocoa, and out came Chimera. This browser became today’s Camino.

So what is the difference? The big thing is that Firefox is cross platform and Camino is Mac specific. Camino is integrated tightly with a lot of OS X services and uses Mac libraries for its interface, which makes for a prettier, faster app. On the other hand, because Firefox has XUL and Camino doesn’t, Firefox is infinitely more extensible than Camino.

At first I didn’t really notice how fast Camino really was. That was, of course, until I accidentally opened Firefox one day. And I waited. It was then that I realized that Camino was quite noticeably faster in starting, in loading pages, and in quitting. Firefox took up much more memory than Camino did and it showed. After a huge browsing session, Firefox takes its time cleaning up after itself.

So I think I will play around with Camino for a bit longer before making any solid decision.

Today I learned the importance of Firefox profiles.

I’ve always found it annoying when you run Firefox and you can open as many windows as you want until one or two random occasions when Firefox tells you to stuff it because you’re already using that profile. Today, I could not figure out why or how Firefox was already using my profile so I messed around with the profiles and nuked it.

Now it was not until I created another profile and used it before I realized what I’d done. I had effectively nuked all of my saved passwords, preferences, cookies, extensions, themes, and bookmarks. And it took me the past half hour to reset most of my settings.

So listen: never nuke your default Firefox profile.