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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!"
My favourite feature of Omniweb is the "Open Link Behind this Window". When I go to slashdot or any other news page I click the open link behind this window for everything that I wish to read then I go through the windows one by one. For Moz or IE I have to click open in new window hen click back to my original window then repeat. Not much more of a hassle it's just one little thing that I appreciate about Omniweb.
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.
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.