Silver Clipboard

Recreational vs Productive Browsing

Firefox is a great browser. With it you can have tons of tabbed webpages open with ads blocked, weather foretold and page rank indicated. What more could a web surfer ask for? Not getting distracted by the weather, the page rank or the other ten tabs, for starters.

Firefox is a recreational browser. When I need to get things done, I turn to Camino.

Good old Camino — the forgotten open source OS X browser. Camino is pretty, simple and gets the job done. There are no plugins: ads are not blocked and their presence is just enough to annoy me back to work if I begin to stray. When I need information on topic ‘X’ I use Camino for precision, ninja-like strikes on the ‘net. Open Camino — ask Google — receive answer— get working.

Firefox, though it is the darling of the open source world, has turned into one hell of a piece of bloatware. Timing it on my MacBook, Firefox takes forty eight seconds from launch to open. Camino takes six. Waiting a nearly a minute for Firefox to open isn’t a long time, but it’s long enough to start wondering about my email, RSS feeds or website stats. Just long enough to get distracted.

Firefox is now limited to recreational browsing, going on the ‘net with the intent of puttering around. But for solid work, Camino is the only choice.

[click here to download Firefox]

[click here to download Camino]

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Photograph by catwall_elle curotto