Stephen Withers
Monday, 01 December 2008 08:50
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
There are two reasons why I can't make Firefox my one and only browser - one of them is subjective, the other objective.
Basically, I don't find it comfortable. I don't know whether it's because Firefox is a cross-platform program, but it never feels quite right. And a related aspect is that I can do without training another spellchecker with the vocabulary I use. I've had to do it with Microsoft Word and the system-wide Mac OS X checker, and I just don't want to do it again.
More rationally, there's a part of my workflow that relies on AppleScript to get information out of certain web pages and into another application. And Firefox 3's AppleScript support is practically non-existent. (As I previously mentioned, I'm not happy about staying with version 2.)
So how about Camino? That uses Mozilla's Gecko HTML engine, but is designed to conform more closely to Mac user interface conventions and takes advantage of Mac-specific technologies.
Well, it does work with iTWire's software, and it is sufficiently 'Mac like' for me. There are a couple of minor niggles - for example, it doesn't seem possible to rearrange tabs, which I frequently do - and two more substantial problems.
The first is that while Camino has relatively good AppleScript support, there doesn't seem to be a Camino version of the script I use daily. It looks like the browser exposes the elements that the script needs to access, so I could probably modify the Safari version to work with Camino.
It doesn't look like it would be a major job, but it's would be time away from writing - and that's what pays the bills.
What's the other problem? Please
read on.
