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.

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.

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.

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.