Before I switched to exclusively using Apple Mac’s I thought that the only web browser available to those poor Apple folk was the - at the time - newly released Safari although I do recall knowing that an old and ugly version of IE (5.5) was also bundled. It was not, of course, true at that time and it is not true today. The Mac platform is as spoilt for choice as users of Windows. All the major browsers are available with the one notable exception of Internet Explorer - a demon which Mac users remain, thankfully, not tempted by.
Personally I have been a Firefox user since the Phoenix days and before the switch. Opera I find too confusing and idiosyncratic. Safari may be relatively fast but I find it’s dark grey toolbars and borders foreboding and just plain ugly and much prefer Omniweb which also uses the same webkit platform. But I have stuck to faithful Firefox partly because of it’s wonderful plugin architecture.
But therein lies, I believe, both the strength and the weakness of Firefox. It can not be denied that with every new update it gets just a little slower at core rendering and while some of the plugins become indispensable, each one adds it’s own overhead. I have found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the need to reboot my Mac because Firefox has, to put it bluntly, slowed to a crawl. But I like it - it does what I need - one or two plugins really are indispensable - so I carried on using it.
And then I was talking just a couple of days back to a guy who mentioned Camino. Camino uses the same framework and engine as Firefox but is both optimised for the Mac platform and has dispensed with the plugin architecture. It is a plain and simple browser without all the bells and whistles of it’s bigger brother. I tried it once a couple of years ago and didn’t like it.
I tried it yesterday and was, to put it simply, quite amazed. My own site here was displaying in a fraction of the time Firefox takes to render it. Other sites I regularly visit were suddenly popping up while Firefox was still looking for the progress bar. And the good news seems to be that Camino is not suffering from the same degradation that Firefox regularly displays. This - to me - is a revelation of some magnitude. If, like me, you looked at Camino a few years back, thought the centrally located tabs were a little weird and then dismissed it… load it up and have a go with today’s version. It’s just like the weather here in England today. Hot.

A few days back I wrote an item called
Ok - so the image is a bit hackneyed and overused but old George knew what he was talking about and whilst he may have got the date wrong he would have been sure to notice how England is slipping pathetically, day by day, into a surveillance society, much of it started under the leadership of namesake Tony Blair.
A few months back I mourned the difficulty in finding
I have to say I had never heard of Gary Thuerk until today but it is he, I am told, who has the onerous distinction of being the first person to send out ’spam’ emails. Sent May 3rd 1978 via Arpanet - the original network that eventually turned into the internet we have today - Thuerk worked for mini-computer manufacturer DEC and emailed 400 people to inform them of new DEC services.
Cos I never ‘ad no proper educashion I am often