Blogs have been hell in recent months

[Etnier]

Version 2.1.2 (1.9.2.28 20120308211433)
OSX 10.6.8
Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro4,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.5 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 6 GB

In recent months accessing the blogs I visit daily causes massive processor loads, swinging madly between one and another (Activity Monitor). Fans ramp up, the whole computer gets taken over, and is unusable until I close the blog page I'm trying to read. Dangerous Minds did this for a while; so did The Ael, now it's http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com.

Anyone know what's going on and how I can fight it. Life with Camino is just getting worse and worse as it fades into the past.

[Etnier]

There is a fix for this, if anyone cares- posted today in MacInTouch:

Steve Setzer
The wonderful Camino browser is actually compatible with nearly all modern web sites. But, due to something overlooked by the authors in the latest build (2.1.2), Camino is having problems with some sites (for example, GMail always puts up a warning about using an out of date browser).

Those of us who love Camino don't want to change the browser's "user agent string" to spoof sites into thinking it's Safari or Firefox. We want websites to know we use Camino so they'll continue to support it. However, there's a simple change that will let you keep "Camino" as the user agent while enhancing compatibility.

(1) In the Camino address bar, type "about:config". If necessary, click OK to be allowed to edit the settings.

(2) In the search bar at the top of the settings list, type "user". This will shorten the list.

(3) Double-click the setting called "general.useragent.extra.notfox". At this point, it probably has the value "(like Firefox/3.6.28)"

(4) Edit that value, changing it to say "(like Firefox/13.0)"

(5) Save, quit and restart Camino.

On my machine, this changed only the last part of the browser's agent string, from
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120308 Camino/2.1.2 (like Firefox/3.6.28)
to
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120308 Camino/2.1.2 (like Firefox/13.0)

This fixed our problems with GMail and Blogspot.

The reason it works is because Camino 2.1.2 truly has the same core version of the Gecko web browser engine as Firefox 13.0. And Firefox 13 is modern enough for nearly every site on the Internet today, while Firefox 3.6.28 looks positively ancient to some browser-sniffers that trigger on the Firefox version.

Hopefully the maintainers of Camino will address this soon. But if you're having trouble with Camino, try this fix before switching to Safari or Firefox.

This works. ALL of the bad behavior I'd been experiencing in recent months has stopped. Thanks to all who chimed in here to offer assistance.

[cflawson]

Yeah, that's not "overlooked"; it's a lie, and it's equally likely to *break* some sites just as badly as those it fixes were broken before.

cl

[Uncle Asad]

Steve Setzer
The reason it works is because Camino 2.1.2 truly has the same core version of the Gecko web browser engine as Firefox 13.0

This is absolutely not the case, and claiming to be Firefox 13 will cause problems on other sites that require web content features available only in later versions of Gecko. (Also, no restart of Camino is required when changing the UA string, either by messing with that pref or by using the excellent UserAgent third-party prefPane. You will have to reload an already-loaded page so it sees the new UA string, but any new pages you load will see the new string immediately.)

This works. ALL of the bad behavior I'd been experiencing in recent months has stopped.

I'm happy to see that it has worked for you and for the guy on MacInTouch However, be aware that it will cause problems on other sites, and if you run into problems, try reverting the change (or using a fresh profile) to see if the site works properly with the default user-agent string.

We debated eliminating the "like Firefox/foo" string entirely before shipping Camino 2.1, but the problem was that too many common sites were still sniffing for "Firefox" (instead of "Gecko" or "Gecko" and a Gecko version) and would serve Camino completely broken (or missing) content. Just dropping the version string (but keeping "like Firefox") didn't produce any significant change in the experience on the "broken" side or the "nagging for upgrade" side. We also weren't willing to change the UA string to blindly lie about browser compatibility by claiming to be some newer version of Firefox.

Unfortunately, the sad truth of the matter is that unless you are Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or IE, vast swaths of the web are still going to mis-handle you in one way or another. The situation has improved from 10+ years ago where only Netscape and IE were properly handled, but many web developers would still prefer there only be 1-2 standard browsers. And we need more manpower to get Camino to a more modern browser engine

As for your original question (which I missed; sorry), the most common performance problem I've seen is with rogue JavaScripts pegging the CPU, and your description seems to match that problem (I don't currently see it on the site you linked, so either the site has removed the offending JS or I've got the hosts of the offending JS blocked). You can load pages with JS turned off, and better-written sites will just work, or "simply" block problem third-party JavaScript-serving sites. Unfortunately, this latter method involves adding sites to permissions.sqlite, which is nowhere as user-friendly as editing hostperm.1 used to be pre-Camino 2 (we've long talked about writing a third-party preference pane to support this, but no-one's had the time ).

[Etnier]

Sorry to be late in replying myself. This is very interesting info, and much appreciated. Thanks!

[upkeep]

I think this may be a 'your milage may vary' type solution.

I gave it a go, and right off the bat, it caused issues at PhotoBucket. (Mind you, I suspect PB causes a lot of their own issues ) That said, I think I'll just stay with 'spoofing' for the time being, and no . . . I'm not running on Intel, nor using 10.6.

[ljgww]

possible web test case: https://soundcloud.com/ (not letting on, tweak or no tweak)

this tweak however influenced facebook to stop complaining... will see if it fixes broken uploads (consistently bugging)

[LIMPET235]

Locking this due to old age.