There’s this little routine that my business partner and I go through every time he comes into my office. He walks in and asks me to pull up a web site. I open a new tab, or page and lo and behold I get the spinning beachball of death. Without fail, this happens nearly every time. Normally I dismiss this problem to having to much open — which is usually true — but today I didn’t have that much open, so I resolved to see what was causing this holdup.

The reason for the beachball of death is that my computer’s system resources are maxed out, so I fired up “Activity Monitor” to see what was happening under the hood. Looking closely, the offending application was Safari. My browser was gobbling up the majority of my resources and by creating another tab, or window, I was simply adding to the load.

So that got me to thinking… “what is the best lean and mean browser for Mac OS?”

From just the nominal searching that I did, there seem to be people lamenting the bloat of both Safari and Firefox. Opera might be a contender, but since it doesn’t work with 1Password, it’s a non-starter. The only other browser I came across that seemed to fit the bill is Camino (think Firefox engine with a true Mac OS UI).

So I’m playing with Camino for the time being, but what do you think? Is there a browser out there that you’d recommend?