When I started using Safari 3.0.1 beta at work, I was impressed, but not impressed enough to ditch Opera. At home, however, I am using Camino, which I love, which is based on Gecko, the underlying Mozilla engine that also forms the core of Firefox. The problem is, as much as I love Camino, it’s tough to use for development: it doesn’t support extensions, it doesn’t have a javascript debugger that works, it doesn’t have draggable tabs, or tab restore, and it’s not very easy to extend functionality. There are lots of tricks at PimpMyCamino, but even today, the most useful add-on, “CamiScript,” is billed as unstable on Camino version above 1.0. Camino 1.0 was released in the first half of 2006. We’re over a year later.

This is not a post to bitch about Camino though. I love 1.5 and it’s serving me well. The thing is, I downloaded a nightly build of Webkit recently. Webkit is to Safari what Gecko is to Camino, and Webkit comes easily packaged in a disk image that requires no installation.

Webkit nightlies are awesome. First, there’s the page inspector. From a development standpoint, this is awesome.

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The inspector shows you each detail of the page load. You’ve got the entire page transfer size, as well as the page transfer time. You can break it down by element or by element type. You can view the headers sent and received. This is tremendously useful. It’s been very interesting to see what parts of requests are properly cached and compare original load to subsequent page loads.

Then we have “Drosera,” the Javascript debugger.

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I haven’t quite figured out how to use this tool, but I’m excited that it exists. It’s something I’ve needed for some time on a Mac. This is all very promising.

Safari may be mostly bare, but by the time 3.0 final is released with Leopard, plus the fact that Safari exists on Windows, it, or its featureful offshoot based on Webkit, Shiira, just may be my main Mac browser.

You can get Webkit nightlies at nightly.webkit.org.

Enter Camino, which not only looks and feels like Mac, but tastes like it too by behaving like a real Mac app. Aqua widgets, proper alert boxes, a prefs panel that fits the theme. Camino is a fantastic browser and runs extremely well and is very stable. And today they release 1.5 – a pretty major milestone – and reveal their new website.

Congrats to the Camino team.

Nothing feels as perfect as Camino on my Mac, but it’s seriously lacking in the developer department. No javascript console, no web developer tools, no draggable tabs. Hopefully by 2.0 this will be ironed out.