In the market for a lightweight, fast, browser with a genuine MacOS look and feel?

You need Camino.

This open-source, Gecko-based browser is totally free and is dedicated to its core mission — offering a speedy, simple, standards-compliant browser with a 100 percent MacOS X look and feel.

All the widgets and UI elements draw from the native Mac Cocoa UI. Cocoa services such as built-in dictionary and spell-check are accessible directly from Camino, too.

A bit of history: Back around the turn of the millennium, when MacOS X was brand new and shiny, its browsing options were pretty limited. Internet Explorer 5 was the Mac’s default browser. In MacOS 9, IE5 was actually pretty good – it offered a brisk browsing experience and lots of features.

But the OS X version was a non-native port of the OS 9 version, and showed: it didn’t use Mac OSX’s beautiful typography or UI elements.

That’s when a group of engineers decided to port the open-source Netscape browser’s Gecko engine over to a fully OS X-native browser. Back then, it was called Chimera. Now, it’s called Camino.

That commitment to OS X-friendliness continues to this day; Camino uses a bookmark system that’s remarkably similar to Safari’s, and offers full use of Cocoa UI elements.

Now, Camino’s not for everyone: If you need Firefox plug-ins, they’re probably not going to work. And although there are modes and plug-ins for Camino, the community isn’t nearly as vibrant as the much-larger Firefox plug-in community.

Plus, Camino doesn’t have some of the snazzier features of newer browsers, like Firefox’s “Awesome bar”.

But if a lightweight, MacOS-embracing, fast browser is what you’re after, Camino might be the pony to bet on.

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Author Bio: James Mowery is a computer geek that writes about technology and related topics. To read more blog posts by him, go to online dating.