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!"

Comments

It does support proxies.

[ZigMonty]

The only problem I have with 4.1 is that there is no way to use a proxy.

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.

Re:CSS

[technomancerX]

"I think the majority of people who are using OmniWeb are using it for one of these two reasons:"

Or possibly because it lacks the HUGE security holes IE is famous for, or because the OmniWeb UI is fantastic.

I do agree that they need to improve CSS support though...

Re:CSS

[cuyler]

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.

OmniWeb vs. Chimera

[fraki]

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.

Re:OmniWeb vs. Chimera

[Auckerman]

"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."

This has got to be the most ANNOYING UI error in OS X. If the user wanted to interact with an application, they would click on the dock. Having apps auto unhide, auto force to top of the screen, auto come out of the dock is annoying. Regardless of usefulness. Maybe the icon of the browser should instead have a number for each fully loaded uninteracted web pages....less intrusive and certainly just as informative.

So did Apple, evidently

[rjamestaylor]

• 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.

Re:Open Link Behind this Window

[frankie]

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

Re:CSS

[Alex Thorpe]

Don't forget OmniWeb's use of MacOS X's spell checker. Very useful in forums like /., Fark.com, the MacGamer.com forums.

I've been testing on Mozilla RC3 lately, and it's a lot faster than OmniWeb, but there's no spell checking, no anti-aliased text, and a generally more cluttered interface. Also, it imported my bookmarks from IE, which I rarely use.

More on Omniweb

[melquiades]

Omniweb also has a large number of quite substantive functional advantages over most browsers, e.g.:

• It has the nicest cookie management functionality of any web browser anywhere (still).
  
• It has a very slick mechanism for auto-checking for updates to selected bookmarks.
  
• It has really good ad filtering and anti-popup capability. You can filter content by domain regexp and images by size. (Does Chimera do this as well? Can't remember.) And I saw the "Allow popups: Always / In response to a click / Never" option in Omniweb first.
  
• It allows you to watch the progress of all the individual components of a downloading page, and even stop individual components so the overall page can proceed. For example, if a page is spinning forever because the stylesheet or an image is on some server that's down, you can skip that item and let the rest of the page load.
  
• After a page has downloaded, you can selectively examine, reload, and even edit a page's components.
  
• Unless you're looking for WYSIWIG, it's great for editing page sources.

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.

Re:More on Omniweb

[melquiades]

I severely doubt that only 2.7% of websites use either HTML, Javascript, or CSS

No, but only 2.7% of websites use Javascript, CSS, or HTML that doesn't work in Omniweb. Its support for these things is not complete, but quite good and constantly improving.

Emacs key bindings, one more point for OW

[rjrjr]

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

Not a port?

[baruz]

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.

I thought it was a NeXT port.

Yes, I’m a paying customer!

It first was an NX to NS ala NeXTSTEP to Openstep

[tyrione]

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.

Use 3 or 4 different browsers

[miguel_at_menino.com]

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.

Re:Use 3 or 4 different browsers

[krugdm]

I had trouble using OmniWeb for my online banking as well. The funny thing is, all I did was go to the "Compatability" preference panel and and change the browser identification to "IE 5.1 for MacOS X" and my online bank site worked perfectly.