When I switched back to OS X a few years ago, I used to love Camino — the Mozilla port that eschews cross-platform XUL for a Cocoa (i.e., Mac native) user interface. However, as Firefox become more Mac-friendly, and Camino rotted on the vine, I abandoned it for Firefox.

I tried it again today, just for grins. Wow. The latest version (1.0b1) looks really nice, has been recently updated, and as a bonus, seems to run quite a bit faster than Firefox. The most dramatic example is Mozilla’s SVG Tetris; it’s sluggish on Mac/Firefox, but downright snappy in Camino.

I’ve been favoring Safari of late because its more responsive and more polished than Firefox, but after playing with the new Camino, when asked:

Camino is my default browser

I had to say, “Yes.”