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OmniWeb 4.1 Beta Available
AnamanFan writes "A new version of OmniWeb 4.1 Public beta 7 has been released by The Omni Group. It is available for download for English only (3.3MB) and Internationalized (6.5MB) versions; read the release notes for more information. This is one of the popular web browsers for Mac OS X, and one of the few that are not direct ports from other systems. The must be doing something right for getting two Apple Design Awards for 2001!"
I use OmniWeb for all my web browsing and it is great. It blocks the ads in /. and others. It even blocks pop-up javascript windows.
The only problem I have with 4.1 is that there is no way to use a proxy.
If the javascript does not work, I use IE to see if it is OmniWeb that is causing the problem.
Java can crash OmniWeb but I always send the backtrace in with a description of what I was doing, mainly http://games.yahoo.com.
I think the majority of people who are using OmniWeb are using it for one of these two reasons:
The first reason will disappear as soon as the next version of Mac OS X comes out - it will allow Carbon Apps to use the pretty quartz text - meaning IE will probably be as slick.
I know I keep pushing it, but once Chimera hits primetime it will be the best browser around.
-braxton
Wouldn't you be happy to award a browser something that wasn't Internet Explorer? I prefer Chimera as my primary Web browser though.
What? Oh, you must have missed a release note. OmniWeb now honours the system wide proxy settings. Go to System Preferences -> Network and select your interface, click on the Proxies tab and enter your settings.
Hope that helps.
Chimera is a really great browser, and I'll most likely use it when a few more needed features are added. However, at the moment I find OmniWeb 4.1 to be just about as fast at rendering pages as Chimera, and generally nicer. Advantages I think OmniWeb has:
- Nicer interface (although Chimera has Aqua interface widgets, the ones in OmniWeb are nicer).
- Preferences are fully implemented (this will change, of course).
- The window doesn't pop up in front of other applications when it's loaded a page - this is very annoying in Chimera, hopefully it will be fixed soon.
- A bunch of other small things, most of which will probably be added to Chimera eventually: consistent window size / location, full URL bar takes up less space, etc.
Chimera will really kick ass when it's done, though. It is faster, and tabbed browsing is quite nice, if sluggish. By the way, Omni Group wants you to pay for OmniWeb, and they give you little 'encouragements' to do so, but it's not crippleware - and much as I like OmniWeb, I don't think one should have to pay for a web browser.
- from the i-thought-microsoft-won-the-browser-wars dept.
Well, MS with Netscape as a distant second, anyway. When using OmniWeb to visit Apple's iTools site (which is critical lately if you are using a @mac.com address as the service isn't playing nicely with Mail.app) you are met with the "Sorry, we don't support your browser" and are given links to download either Internet Explorer or (an old version) of Netscape.However, like Konqueror, Omniweb let's you pretend to be any browser you wish. So, I'm using iTools to get my email via OmniWeb.
Did I mention that OmniWeb is much, much faster than Mozilla? Wow.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I think you'll find that using OmniWeb's "Open page behind this window" is distinctly inferior to Mozilla and Chimera's tabbed browsing.
In fact, I can't think why the OmniGroup don't hurry and implement this in OmniWeb. It is by far the most useful advance in browser UI that I have ever encountered.
When browsing slashdot, I open all the links I'm interested in in new tabs and then jump between them, all without the hassle of opening a bunch of windows.
In MSIE 5.1.x, command-shift-click does exactly the same thing. Unfortunately I don't think there's a way to make that the default behavior.
In the Mozilla family, I find tabbed browsing thoroughly superior to multiple windows.
If Chimera continues to progress, it should surpass Omniweb in all respects some time this year. I'll probably switch from Mozilla to Chimera around 0.6
I do Mozilla with watchful eye on Chimera.
Paid my thirty bucks last fall for OmniWeb. Renders text and graphics in gorgeous Quartz technicolor or whatever. No CSS. Launch it once or twice a week.
What's the reason for promo on Slashdot? All the Mac software sites had this yesterday or day before. This a little plug by the NeXTies in the crowd or what?
Maybe next year. BTW, check out all the other OmniStuff. Some of it is pretty neat. Some is even free. (Dictionary?) And it seems to me that OmniGraffle was the big trophy winner, not OmniWeb at WWDC. Maybe writer speaks of times past? Hey, MacPaint was once a killer app.
Pretty is as pretty does. OmniWeb doesn't. Sad. Maybe some day.
And its UI isn't just pretty -- they're paid meticulous attention to details, making their UI clean, minimal, gentle on screen real estate, easy on the eye, and slick slick slick. It's all in the details: the nice, compact download history window with draggable icons; the history drawer which groups global history by site, and has a search box; the spell checking in text areas like the one I'm typing in now (which you can disable, of course).
Its support for CSS and DHTML isn't up to par. But they're improving that -- and for the 97.3% of the web for which those things don't matter, Omniweb is a really nice browser to work with. I recommend that OS X users give it a try.
I also recommend that browser developers on all platforms, especially Mozilla developers, give it a hard look and take a lesson from its elegance.
OmniWeb renders web pages' text in best quality. Especialy in Japanese, the OmniWeb's rendering is remarkablely beautiful. Although, OmniWeb can less understand HTMLs and CSSs, Gecko is the best engine about this.
I finally download 4.0, and they come out with 4.1 Beta!
My other sig is extremely clever...
Don't get me wrong, I use Chimera and Omniweb each about 50% of the time, but Chimera's appeal is due to the fact that it runs faster than Omniweb on my G4 400 than to any feature advantage. I have to say that once I get my hands on Jaguar and/or faster hardware, Omniweb may be hard to put down.
My favorite browser's definitely links, but when I have a burning desire to see images (links handles colored text fine, thanks) I use omniweb exclusively. $30.00 and problems with javascript rollovers/animated dancing animals is a small price to pay for the convenience of killed popups along with a UI that is succinct and usable.
How is this a troll? Makes a valid point OmniWeb is a port of Omni web broswer for NextStep and OpenStep, sounds like a direct port to me.
Well, someone had to say it. OW has Emacs key bindings wherever you edit text, a la Mail and TextEdit and a handful of others. I don't even realize how much I rely on them until I spend a little CSS quality time in Chimera.
I don't really have a problem with paying a little for the nicest browser I've ever touched,
rjrjr
Yes, I’m a paying customer!
He was a verray parfit gentil knight.
I use mozilla 1.0 RC3 on xdarwin. it's much faster than the fizzilla carbon version which runs natively in OS X. Unfortunately I haven't gotten plugins to work on this version, so if I need plugins I run to OmniWeb & IE.
OmniWeb is great except for Javascript and Java support.
In truth IE 5.1 for Mac is great, except for the ability to block pop-up windows (Moz & OmniWeb are good at this).
For the sake of pluralism I run other browsers, including Chimera.
If the Java/Javascript/speed/antialiasing/pop-up blocking worked altogether in *any* browser, then I would use that browser exclusively. As it is I use a combination of 3 browsers, depending on what I want to do & where I want to visit.
In short, it sucks to be a browser "consumer"--no single solution works to intelligent satisfaction.
Omni also won 2 Apple Design Awards at WWDC 2002 -- for OmniGraffle. They are one of the coolest software companies out there -- probably due to the fact that they had a running start with their apps, being that they were a NeXT/OpenSTEP development house.
-- Charles A. Plater
WinXP can group same application in the same tab now, but I still like Win2k better(speed + simple GUI)
The term Port is correct in the sense the original OmniWeb was a port of the old NXApp ->NSApp NeXTSTEP to Openstep API porting.
After Openstep 4.0 came out they still maintained the ability to run within NeXTSTEP 3.x for a long time. Then eventually when they redefined the Openstep APIs, at first, to a modified Yellow Box Foundation API they adapted but did not "port" it.
Finally, after Steve was offered the helm and the Foundation/AppKit APIs, etc morphed into Cocoa, the guys at OmniWeb adapted their NS class based code to be Cocoaified. They have always added their own Network Socket code and multithreaded the application helping discover many bugs that NeXT and Apple Engineering might never have discovered.
No I never worked for Omni, just NeXT and Apple.
Another Gentleman, and friend, who first ported and then rewrote his fleet of Apps, not because they needed to, but because with all the added support within Cocoa he didn't need to reinvent the wheel is Andrew Stone, of Stone Design.
Caffeine Software as well, but they both work in Apple Engineering with one doing a bang up job of co-developing Quartz with a few other fellows.
Unlike the PC world, no Mac browser rules. I'm forced to use 3 or 4 different browsers every day.
IE 5.1 for my banking and similar stuff. Omniweb doesn't work. Mozilla doesn't work. Chimera doesn't either. But IE 5.1 is just shit for normal browsing. I hate that bug with the blank parts of pages.
Mozilla for general browsing. I love the tabbed browsing feature.
Chimera when I want Mozilla to be pretty, with the nice Quartz rendering. It doesn't do anything else right, though, including java or flash, or even just normal forms.
Omniweb can be a general browser too, but a lot of the sites I visit just don't render so well in Omniweb. But I love the quartz text.
I use Mozilla all the time... and just LOVE tab browsing. When I am 'surfing' the web all I want to touch is my mouse... thats all I should need. I don't want to use keyboard shortcuts to cycle windows. Tabs are an easy sloution to window shades... which i loved in os 9.
Tabs just keep the my UI free of clutter and a bloated dock. I use two windows with maybe 4 or 5 tabs each. Keeps the dock from turning into a peice of bloated junk... and speeds the system up...
I would say IMHO your dead wrong.. but thats fine...
It's BSD on a Mach single-server using NeXT's codebase. Mac apps need to be built against a big compatibility library ("carbon") while NeXTSTEP apps run natively after a few tweaks. They only replaced Display PostScript with Display PDF for licensing reasons. In what sense is OS X a whole new system?