Donut Age: America's Donut Magazine

Build me the perfect browser!

After upgrading to Tiger earlier this summer, I spent some time with the new Safari 2.0 as my primary browser. It has a number of attractive features, but for now, I've come back to Camino (0.8.4). Camino isn't perfect either, but I've become very comfortable with it and the things I missed about it outweighed the features I could only get elsewhere. I'm still waiting, however, for the perfect browser. This mythical beast would combine:

  • Safari's privacy features: Empty Cache and Reset Safari (dumps all saved info, cookies, passwords, etc.) accessible from the File menu, and (new in 2.0) Private Browsing mode (doesn't save history, searches, form information or passwords).
  • Safari's SnapBack (mark a page for quick return during browsing). A very handy for when you have to go burrowing for information, or for working through a Google search.
  • OmniWeb's "workspaces" (you can save whole sets of opened windows and tabs). I've never played with them myself being too cheap to pay for a browser), but bsag's review of Omniweb 5 makes them sound fantastic. This would come in really handy when doing serious research or comparison shopping.
  • Firefox's extensibility. The one area in which Firefox kicks Camino's butt is plug-ins. There's a handful of plug-ins for Camino (including the indispensible PDFBrowser plug-in by Schubert-IT, which I have mentioned before), but nothing like what's been developed for Firefox. Foxylicious alone is almost worth switching, but for me, Firefox has a clunky feel that turns me off.
  • Internet Explorer's bookmark searching. IE/Mac has been orphaned by Microsoft, and I'd pretty much given up on it before that, but the one thing I miss about IE is being able to just type into the addressbar and have it search for matches against page titles and keywords as well as URLs. With Quicksilver and Spotlight, this feature is perhaps less compelling, but I still wouldn't mind seeing another browser pick it up.
  • Camino's overall UI experience. This is a little vague, but Camino just looks good and handles crisply, especially in comparison to its Mozilla-cousin, Firefox. I'm also very happy with its rendering prowess.