davebo's Journal: camino, safari, etc

so i started working on camino again. I submitted my first-in-a-while patch a week ago. just a little fix - getting .webloc files to correctly drag&drop on the toolbar.

it's still languishing.

so, of course, safari beta 2 came out today. It's got tabs. I decided to test out some tab features.

I opened my grouping of 8 blogs I frequent in Camino (downloaded 2 days ago) and Safari. Both load all the blogs in roughly the same amount of time.

BUT - in Camino, I've got spinning beachball until every tab is loaded. In Safari, I can browse & scroll the frontmost tab as soon as it appears - even while the other tabs are loading. Plus - it seems as if the front tab gets priority on rendering. Better use of threading? Maybe. I think it'd be a big thing to fix in Camino. In fact, a bug on it has attracted occasional interest (and some investigation time) since my heyday of working on it. It's not going to get fixed anytime soon.

Also - I played around with entering text in a text field looking at quartz debug. In Camino, because the rendering area is one giant view, repaint commands get rectangularized - so typing in a text field in the middle of the page when there are some animated gifs sitting in the bottom corner results in a large fraction of the view getting redrawn. Not to mention lack of spelling checks, etc. In Safari, this ain't a problem - each item (I imagine) on screen is placed in its own view, so repaints are tiny events. Again - this is something that isn't going to be fixable in Camino without tons and tons of redesign.

So I'm thinking about contributing to Open Office for OS X instead. It's likely to be a project that's not going to be demolished by an Apple-branded replacement in the next few months. And it's still early in the project, so I might be able to make some big improvements easily.

Although I'd still like to do the bookmark stuff in Camino (and I've done some work so far on my own on this), and I'd like to build in bookmarks which can check for updates & whatnot, I'm afraid that's a feature which will appear in Phoenix for OS X (so not as interesting in Camino) and I'd like to do it Cocoa-y, which means trashing the current ns-as-in-netscape not NS-as-in-Nextstep based code. Heck, even just write the bookmarks out as a .plist using Apple's built-in xml parser rather than the (I believe) hand-rolled moz parser it currently uses. And I like the fact that with camino, if something really bugs me, I can fix it (which is not an option with Safari, with the exception of the HTML renderer, whereas I'm more likely to be bugged with UI problems.)