Camino and his friends

1.0 of Camino was finally released this week and of course I had to download it, and OMG it’s beautiful, in the looks department, it’s just, so so perfect. So i’m going to compare it’s fascia to that of other the other leading brands, it’s an extended entry and all that malake….

Camino is a proper cocoa (mac os X’s native app framework) sibling of firefox which I guess means it already has a head start when it comes to beautification. They’ve gone for that quite recent mac look which I think I recall is known as “plastic”, as opposed to brushed steel, or that traditional pin-stripe affair. Anyway, it’s my favourite of all the mac styles. Camino’s icon set really suites it to a tee. I suppose the toolbar does take up a fair amount of screen-estate but ya know, that all adds to the charm I reckon. Anyway, as soon as I glanced at this thing I knew straight away that it’s my favoritist looking web browser ever! I swear, I almost feel like licking the screen.

Epipheny, otherwise known as “Web Browser” is yer standard GTK+ affair, once you’ve seen a gnome app you’ve pretty much seen them all. Here we have the default gnome icon-set, which is bland to say the least. What else can you say? It uses the gecko rendering engine i think?

Firefox is as firefox does. I don’t mind firefox’s look, but I don’t feel overly fond of it. In fact I seem to remember preferring the icon-set they used for the mid-beta’s. The firefox interface’s greatest strength in my opinion is its in-line search bar, which camino sadly lacks. Oh, and it’s brilliantly customisable, for instance on the windows edition you can even move any element to the menu-bar, with flexi-spaces and all that. There are many user created icon-sets and skins and what have you, but i’ve yet to find one that isn’t terribly amateurish.

Flock is perhaps too early in development to discuss, but I’m guessing they’re going to stick with this look, which I feel is a little too concepty and clinical. But hey, you can’t knock the professionalism.

Things are lucking up in the Internet Explorer department, it no longer has its own idea of what HTML is, well for the most part anyway. Unfortunately I still cannot get my head around this new design. none of it feels as though it belongs, there are little fidgety icons floating in mid-air.

I’ve never liked any design decisions of KDE’s. It all so icony. It’s all so, if there’s a function there must be an icon for it on the toolbar. It’s the same with every app KDE make. To be fair it is difficult to judge konqueror because it’s final design is pretty much up to do linux distribution. This is kubuntu’s default.

Never liked the design of opera, it’s not as messy as it used to be, but it still looks like they can’t decide where things should go.

Safari is still the browser I use day to day. I’m not even sure why though, it just works I guess? My only gripe with it is that after any amount of time using firefox I get back on safari missing the in-line search feature terribly. The one good thing I can say about it’s looks is that it feels as if it has been designed in order to not take away anything from the website you’re visiting. It’s toolbar kind of stands back and doesn’t try to distract you. Problem is, I haven’t even had a mac for all that long and i’m already growing tired of brushed steel. More plastic please.