Camino Holdouts: Nightly Report (also, is the white page bug reported?)

[Makosuke]

I'm one of those Camino holdouts who isn't quite comfortable switching to Safari, and I decided to check out some nightlies and poke through the buglist to see what the hope of getting a couple of bugs that make it nearly unusuable fixed is.

The good news:

The bug that caused embedded text selection boxes, or scrolling chunks of text built into a page (iFrames?) to turn blank seems to be fixed in newer nightlies. I don't know if this is related to the drifting iFrame text bug, but since this made using any site with a text list worthless, it's good to have it fixed.

The frame tabs now work just fine on 10.3 as well.


The bad news:

The drifting iFrame text bug (most often seen with Google AdWords ads) is not fixed, and won't be until Apple gets around to it. 10.3.3 does not fix it, although it does help some, and it's not nearly as bad now as with 10.3.2 or earlier with Camino 0.7. If you like Camino, I highly recommend using the OSX feedback section to complain, and maybe they'll do something.

Also, Camino's interface has changed at least three times since 0.7; the previous one (shiny grey, roughly safari-like buttons) was nice, but now they're using ugly, colorful, round, Firebird-like icons that I really hate. Even the 0.7 icons were better.


The Question:

There is a majorly annoying bug when viewing Japanese pages with Camino where large areas of the page will just go white. Here's an easy place to reproduce it:

http://news.tbs.co.jp/

It is not fixed as of the latest nightly, and I can't find a bug for it in the Mozilla bugtrack section. Does anybody more familiar with Camino's development than I have any idea if this is even a known issue? It's caused my wife to switch to Safari.

 

[tveric]

When reading about someone who isn't comfortable switching to Safari from Camino, a phrase from "Wayne's World" comes to mind.

"We're making some changes to the show."
"We fear change!"

Valid, perhaps, at times, but considering Safari is the greatest browser ever, and you're struggling to make bug fixes that make your browser almost unusable, I'd say it's time to rethink your position.

 

[Makosuke]

Valid, perhaps, at times, but considering Safari is the greatest browser ever, and you're struggling to make bug fixes that make your browser almost unusable, I'd say it's time to rethink your position.

You're sort of missing my point. Safari is indeed a good browser, and I like and use it. There are, however, things that the Gecko engine does better, Camino can do a few things Safari can't, and I prefer Camino's interface to Safari's. Point being, I have nothing against Safari, and I do use it at times (more often thanks to the Camino breakage in Panther). My wife, since Camino is indeed unusuable for her Japanese browsing, switched to Safari despite the fact she prefers Camino.

But I'm still keeping an eye on Camino, because if and when the deal-breakers for it get fixed, I intend to go back to using it more or less full time. There's a difference between clinging to a worthless program simply for familiarity's sake and trying to get a good piece of software back on track so you can again use it comfortably.

But this isn't intended to be yet another Camino-versus-Safari argument; I was just trying to offer a status update for 10.3-using Camino fans who've swtiched to Safari due to the glitches or haven't been keeping up on nightly builds.

And, I'm wondering if that blank area bug is known, since it sure needs fixin', and if nobody else has reported it, I will.

 

[bousozoku]

I tried the TBS news link with both a Camino nightly build (with colour icons) and Firefox. Strange that Firefox is fine with it but Camino is not. I'm no longer a Camino holdout since Firefox is available but I really don't care for Safari because of how it deals with bookmarks. It still feels as though nothing else is as nimble as Camino.

 

[Makosuke]

Strange that Firefox is fine with it but Camino is not.

Not really; they both use the same rendering engine to decide what goes where, but both Firefox and Mozilla, as far as I know, use a different API for drawing text to the screen. It's the same reason only Camino has the 10.3 floating text glitch.