Most Mac OS X users probably use Safari, Firefox or Opera for their internet browsing. But every now and again it is nice to have a change of browser. Instead of using your regular browser, why not try Camino, Shiira or Sunrise ?
Camino is a browser that has been around for quite some time now and was first released way back in February 2002. Camino uses the Gecko rendering engine which is the same rendering engine as many fast popular browsers such as Firefox, Flock and SeaMonkey. So if you like the way that the rendering engine works for Firefox then you should definitely give Camino a try. The inferface for Camino is real simple and easy to navigate around making it very user friendly.
To install and use Camino 50 MB of free hard drive space is required using Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.
Toolbar Search
With the toolbar search you can search Google or any other search engine right from the toolbar from any website.
Find
From within Camino you can search through a webpage by hitting command+F and find results quickly and effortlessly.
Software Update
Camino uses the Sparkle framework so updates for Camino are hassle-free and take only seconds to complete.
AppleScripts Support
You are now able to write AppleScripts for Camino to give you a consistent workflow with your Mac. Camino supports AppleScript commands for adding, opening and deleting bookmarks, opening new tabs and windows as well as many more.
Session Saving
Camino will save your sessions so you can go back to the last webpages you had open when you last closed the browser.
Shiira is another awesome browser that is Mac OS X native. Shiira is based off Web Kit which is the same rendering engine as Safari so this is also a very fast browser. Shiira has been in development for around 4 years so it has picked up some nice unique features along the years.
One really nice thing that I like about Shiira is the PageDock. The PageDock is similar to a tab bar but it is displayed along the bottom of the browser and it gives you thumbnails of the pages that you’re currently browsing. If you don’t like the PageDock though you can change it in the preferences so that Shiira uses a tab bar instead.
Shiira also has a cool little widget that you can use in Dashboard called Shiira Mini and it is basically a stripped down version of Shiira. It can come in really useful when you want to browse a website quickly without having to open an actual application.
With Shiira you can also browse a website fullscreen and use an Exposé like feature to browse easily around tabs that you have open
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Sunrise is a very lightweight browser that is supported in English, Japanese, Spanish, German and Taiwanese. The current stable version of writing this is Sunrise 1.7.4. It is a very small 1.1MB app and requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later to run.
Just like Shiira, Sunrise uses the same rendering engine as Safari, Web Kit. The toolbar for Sunrise is really small so it gives a better amount of page viewing then any browser I’ve came across so far.
Visual Bookmarks
With Sunrise your bookmarks are displayed visually so it makes for quicker searching if you have a lot of bookmarks and can’t remember the name of the website you’re looking for but you can remember what it looks like.
Viewing Source
You can change the application that is used to view the source code of websites so you can choose an application that has syntax highlighting for easier viewing of code.
Search Engine
You can customize the search engine that Sunrise uses to search the internet for results that you want.
Other Features
Within Sunrise you can also press File->Save Entire Page as PDF to save the page into a portable document format. Another feature that Sunrise has is being able to change the alpha of the application so you can see what other windows you have behind it and you can change the width of Sunrise at the click of a button in case you’re designing a website and want to see what it would look like when the browser is at a specific size.
Have you used any of these three browsers? If so, let us know what you think of them in the comments!
(By) Wez is a student studying computers, also does programming and video tutorials and writes about technology, software and websites, check out his blog @ www.TheTutorialBlog.com
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Filed Under: Browser ¦ Lists of tools ¦ Mac
Tags: better alternatives, browsers, Mac
Competition is not the property of Microsoft only it is owned by others also. I am a windows user. On the net people always haunt for something new.
When it comes to browsers, FIREFOX rulez! God bless Mozilla Corp.
I’ve tested other browsers and I’ve really tried to like them (The two week Safari challenge), but I just couldn’t. I’ve tried Safari, Opera, Camino etc, but nothing compares to Firefox. I agree with @Zubin.
On my Windows machine I found my perfect browser with K-Meleon. I get the Gecko engine, really fast startup and browsing, and really small footprint on my hard drive, and little to no bloat. As far as I’m concerned, Google Chrome is playing catch-up to K-Meleon.
Unfortunately, I have yet to find a browser for OS X that meets these criteria. The only one I haven’t tried yet is Sunrise.
Any suggestions?
I’ve been searching for ages for a decent Mac browser. Safari is stable and fast enough but just doesn’t do it for me, and I’ve never liked Firefox (sorry!). On Windows I’m a big fan of Opera, but the user interface feels a bit at-odds with OS X, even using different themes.
I tried Shiira recently and thought it was brilliant, but the latest version has several bugs and it doesn’t appear to be in development anymore? A real shame if that’s the case.
Never heard of Sunrise, but it looks interesting. I’ll give it a try and see if it can replace my current Safari-Opera-ie4osx (an outdated IE running in Darwine, to access my online banking which doesn’t acknowledge the existence of anything other than Windows XP and IE6).
I tried Sunrise recently. It wasn’t bad, but I found it quite quirky. I really disliked the way it handles bookmarks. I guess I’ll stick with Safari since I haven’t found anything better.