There is an issue with Camino that also is present in other web browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla: when requesting a page, the browser will take all available CPU time it can. This can be quite annoying for individuals like myself that do a lot of CGI scripting work (Lasso in my case), where developing a page requires constant reloading of a web page, only to have things slow down to a crawl because the web browser and web server on the same machine fighting for dominance.
The reason for the CPU usage is due to the status "barber pole" animating. Since it seems that this animation routine is built into OS X, the issue is not really an issue with Camino, but more with Mac OS X itself (you can see similar behavior in other applications which also use the barber pole animation).
To resolve the issue of CPU usage, all you have to do is remove the status bar from the BrowserWindow.nib file. This file is inside the Camino.app bundle (control-click on the app for the Show Package Contents pop-up), on the path Contents -> Resources -> English.lproj -> BrowserWindow.nib.
To edit this file, you will need to have the Developer Tools installed (or XCode if you are fortunate enough to have it). Once open, simply double click on the "Browser" icon in the BrowserWindow.nib window, and then select and delete the status barber pole widget.
Save, and restart Camino, and you should find it to be much quicker during page loads. This might also affect other areas of performance, such as browsing pages that contain Flash content.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030920075803942