Valhalla Island

Last time I decided to try Flock out, giving it a real go as my full time browser for a week. If it wasn’t perfect, I was giving Opera a go. They both did so well that I’m now back to Camino, what happened?

Flock was OK but had a lot of small things that annoyed me. The first was when trying to import all my information from Firefox, Flock does not import from Firefox. A browser built on top of Firefox does not import from Firefox. So I had to export my bookmarks, import them into Safari and then import from Safari to Flock.

Actually, managing the bookmarks was a nightmare. There’s no folders, just collections, inside collections you can’t have folders. It goes against every other bookmarks system I’ve used. I like to have a folder of bookmarks on my bookmarks toolbar, I couldn’t with Flock.

Another small annoyance that wasn’t so small considering it’s right there all the time is the slightly off vertical center of text on the bookmarks toolbar and in tabs. It seems to be a pixel too high in the toolbar and a pixel or two too low on the tabs. Things like this annoy and frustrate me. Things like this should be right, they’re easy to get right. I can forgive and ignore a huge, highly complicated feature for being slightly off but not the vertical alignment of text.

Flock was far from perfect so 7 days later I was trying out Opera. Opera lasted an hour or two. I enjoy Opera’s interface, the default icons, it’s OS X like while still being unique.

It only lasted an hour because it has no bookmarks toolbar and no options. A bookmarks toolbar is important to me. I never used to use one but since I’ve started I’ve come to depend on it, I can’t use a browser without one. Also, there’s no options, I couldn’t make links from other applications open in a background tab. I couldn’t make tabs in general load in the background. I couldn’t customise the toolbar. There’s a lot I couldn’t do and I was forced to change familar browsing habits to accomodate Opera’s lack of features.

So I’m back to Camino. Quite a humble little browser. It’s fast, has a nice interface but is lacking a lot of the more enjoyable features from Firefox. Things like the nice find-as-you-type content search, being able to change tab ordering, built-in text field spell checker, extensions, there’s a lot Camino is missing out on.

Pimp my Camino has lots nice additions but it’s still not nearly enough.

The most frustrating thing about consistently changing browsers is the lack of ability to import everything that’s not just bookmarks, cookies, field values, saved passwords, tempory files. The only browser I’ve used that supports this is Firefox for Windows, it wins yet again.

Maybe it’s time to try Bon Echo again. I did try it once but my computer was so confused by which was the default browser and whether they were both actually FireFox that I almost lost all my bookmarks. That scared me off Bon Echo but maybe I should give it another chance.