Perhaps it does a better job on broadband. Simon says Camino is incredibly fast even on his old G3 PowerBook. I’m currently using Camino 1.6.4 as my Web-posting workhorse on one of my Pismos, and it’s a good browser, but I would rate it considerably lower than fabulous. Simon turns out to be a big Camino fan, declaring it “fabulous”.

I also love little things like buttons to toggle image loading on and off (huge when you’re stuck with dialup access) and page zooming on the main interface without having to root around in menus. I like Opera’s user interface, although I liked the previous version before Opera’s recent facelift better. I’m massively impressed with its stability even when downloading a dozen or more pages simultaneously over my dog-slow dialup connection (although stability has slipped a bit with the most recent builds, it’s still impressive)Īs for appearance, that’s a subjective judgment. I prefer the way Opera renders text, especially if it’s to be copied and pasted into a text editor, to most other browsers. It also has far and away the best download manager of any browser I’ve ever used, with a pause and resume feature that works dependably. It is sluggish to start up, but that’s mitigated somewhat by its having the best, no-hassle session resume support of any Mac browser. Personally, I find it among the fastest browsers at any given time, both on my Tiger and Leopard machines. I use a lot of browsers, and Opera is my overall favorite for general surfing.

He described Opera as slow to start up, slow to load pages, and the only browser not to render his website home page properly – and subjectively as having “one of the ugliest user interfaces I have seen in a long time it looks very dated.”

Simon looked at Opera 9.5.2 on his 400 MHz Pismo PowerBook G3, which he rated as having come a long way in the past year, but still way behind its competitors. While I no longer have any G3 machines in active service, my wife is still using a 700 MHz iBook G3 running Mac OS X 10.4.11 Tiger, and I have two old Pismo PowerBooks in production and road warrior service, both with 550 MHz G4 processor upgrades and also running 10.4.11.Įven my main production workhorse, a 1.33 GHz 17″ PowerBook G4, is a not exactly spring’s chicken, but it runs Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.īeing something of a browser-follower, I enjoyed reading Simon’s article, but I was interested at how much his impressions and experiences deviated from my own, given that we’re using somewhat similar hardware and the same OS version. Last week fellow Low End Mac columnist Simon Royal posted a feature comparing nine Web browsers in the context of use on G3 and older G4 Macs.

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