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Interview with Ken Case, CEO At Omni Group
Gentu writes "Omni Group, makers of OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and other OSX products, talked to OSNews via its CEO, Ken Case. The interview talks about the company and its products, Apple's strategies, Safari, NeXT and the future. Case believes that Safari does not pose a threat to the OmniWeb market-share."
Those guys at omni are uber elite hackers. Been programming OSX since it was NeXT. They're the ones who ported Quake II to Mac in a week! Impressive group of coders right there. Omniweb is an excellent browser as well. If I'm not mistaken it's the old browser from the NeXT systems.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
OmniWeb sucks.
No tabbed browsing, very poor standards support (CSS, JavaScript).
One thing about it absolutely rocks though: cookie handling.
In OmniWeb you can specify if cookies are rejected, kept until end of session, kept indefinitely, or if omniweb should pop up a dialog asking what to do on each cookie.
You set one of these as the default, and you can set any one of these options on individual domeains.
Very simple. This allows me to set cookie handling normally on slashdot.org, paypal.com, etc., for auto-login; reject cookies from online ad sites; and accept cookies until end of session on all other sites.
This gives me nice fine-grained control over cookies. How come no other browser does this? With most browsers it's all or none.
Add in an option to reject cookies from sites other than the one in the location bar (to stop ads and third-party images from tracking me), and you'd have the perfect cookie control.
I hope this kind of cookie control shows up in Safari.
perhaps that's because they'd have to have some market share to lose some?
seriously, i tried omniweb on recommendation. however, i found it seriously lacking. while it must have strengths (or it wouldn't garner a recommendation from anyone), it doesn't have tabs, nor does it render css. with those two shortfalls, especially the latter, it's pretty much unusable in my eyes.
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I take exception to the idea that no other web browser does the cookie management similar to OmniWeb. iCab, also available for Mac OS X does exactly this.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
--great browser. Best cookie control, best image control. It's my browser of choice on the mac. I will admit I've not tried omniweb though, but have tried all the other browsers on mac (classic) so far that I could find. Better than all of them, IMO. Apple should have sought those guys out for "howtos" on making safari, or just bought them. I see people going on and on about opera and chimera and konq and now safari, "small, fast" etc. Phooie, icab got small and fast down already. The developer is a mac loyalist as well, too bad he's not as appreciated as these other guys. That was the first thing I thought of when I read about safari, that it would take away from people trying iCab. Also the only modern GUI browser that is fully functional with any speed on the older 68k macs that I have own.
As everyone else pointed out so well was cookie control.
The toolbar, over looked by most, was a another huge factor for me wanted be able to have every pixel i can get for a web page. I loved how the link was in the toolbar too. Also on the toolbar, why was apple the first one to put the reload and stop button in one? I'm I the only person in the world that thinks that was just genius?!?! anywho...
Back in the days of 3 browsers (ie, mozilla, omniweb) Omniweb won me over based on loading fast and looking so damn good but now the heat is on with Chimera, Phoenix (why? i don't know), Safari but I think if Onmiweb can take what made it and other browsers great I would gladly jump right back, and keep chimera on the side, we all know why ;)
The others are imposters. Do not approach them (well except for Chimera).
Nope, they ported Quake *3* to MacOS X. Quake 2 was ported by these guys.
As far as I recall, Opera has the stop/reload button combination, and has had for years.
It's a good idea in some respects, but it also takes me a little while to get used to - I like it when buttons are discrete.
I have read your posts on this subject over and over and over and over and over and over again. Do you ever stop? All you ever say is that tabbed browsing is bad, and everyone is simply ignorant who thinks otherwise. I personally have found that tabbed browsing is not particularly helpful to me, but I am not so arrogant as to proclaim that b/c I don't find it useful, it is not useful to someone else.
Either shut-up or do a scientific study on the usability of tabbed browsing and report it!!! Your "my way is the only way" mantra does nothing to contribute to the debate over tabbed browsing.
I have read this guy on other threads. HE IS NOT BEING SARCASTIC. I would recommend you search for all of his posts, but you have read the extent of his arguments. He has nothing more to say other than "tabbed browsing, bad".
One feature that Omniweb seems to have to itself is the ability to edit the HTML source of pages that you view and then redisplay the pages as edited -- without leaving the browser or the page. This is useful for getting rid of background images or color schemes that make some pages unreadable. It's also good for testing CGI forms, since you can quickly manipulate hidden inputs, etc.
1) tabbed browsing is useful for gathering together a number of otherwise separate windows. It cuts down on the clutter. There is no law against having 2 or more windows open with multiple tabs within them. That is what's call "choice" or "options" or "flexibility". People like to have options.
2) Humans have something called 'short-term memory', which you may be lacking. Many mammals also share a strange mechanical trait that allows the animal to identify items by their sequential appearance and placement. This is obviously another trait that you do not possess, but most humans do. Therefore, when I use tabs, I have the intuition to know the general placement of things. Humans have a limit, whether it be tabs or windows, to handle multiple items and ideas. Personally, I rarely have more than 3 windows open at the same time. When I am doing some heavy research, the window count may go up to 20-30. But that is rare. However, I will not say that b/c my experience browsing is different from yours that what you find useful is bad UI design, necessarily. The basic argument against tabbed browsing is that people don't realize how bad it is. Well, do a f?cking study to, at least, scientifically prove it is bad UI design. All this "my experience is scientifically valid" bullsh?t is sophomoric.
3) Noone has claimed that tabs are the BEST option: tabs simply work for some people. Personally, I have not found them a necessary element of my web browsing.
4) The browser concept in general is a terrible usability example. Imagine all of the crap and the work that has gone into making your "browsing" experience "interactive", "intuitive", and useful. There are many more fundamental problems posed by using a browser to access information than tabs.
I am saddened by the total immaturity of people towards this Developer. The Omnigroup is probably one of the more innovative and clever of the OS X app writers. For all the nil points people point out about Omniweb, I can point out good ones. Of course, you get the ad filtering and pop up blocking. You get Shortcuts, which I'm surprised no one has mentioned. Want to search for an image on Google? Just define it in shortcuts as image@ ... and then the google search string. Now all you do is "image [query]" and boom, it's there. Speech recognition if you need it. Link extraction. The info panel for downloading individual page elements as well as being able to stop laggish elements from loading. A nice HTML editor which I was surprised by to see in a browser. ... love us." Nah, they admit it, and are working on solving their problems.
Also, using the floating text input panel to write up this comment is "not too shabby". Alt dragging links is useful in some instances. Remembering window size, et al. I could go on and on. The thing is, for what I visit, Omniweb renders the sites excellently, at an acceptable speed and it filters out the garbage. What's to trash on this thing? And it's not as if the developer's going out and saying, "Ha ha ha! Look, fools, our browser doesn't support CSS
Also, I think part of NeXT's problem was they alienated developers. Not good. And it's happening again.
You should note that Omni likes tabbed browsing and they're doing work on it:
I really like the tabbed browsing feature found in Netscape 7/Chimera Navigator/Mozilla. Do you have any plans to add this feature to OmniWeb?
We feel the functionality that tabbed browsing provides is very useful and we do plan to add something similar to OmniWeb with version 5.0. Entry last updated on June 24, 2002
source: OmniWeb Support + Help Page
Well, the door was open...
You forgot one thing: The internationalization on OmniWeb is the best I've ever seen. Not just the fact you can get the UI in a bunch of languages, but it handles international web pages very nicely.
(Actually, I think Omni experimented with a combination Stop/Reload button first, in 1994, between OmniWeb 0.5 and 1.0.)
This turns out to be a bad idea from a usability standpoint, because the button can change out from under you (in either direction) as the page finishes loading or starts refreshing, at which point your button click does exactly the opposite of what you wanted it to do (stopping when you wanted to reload, or loading yet again when you wanted to stop).
Since I was here, I thought I'd also add: thanks!
I am a homosexual. I bought an Apple computer because of its well earned reputation for being "the" gay computer. Since I have become an Apple owner, I have been exposed to a whole new world of gay friends. It is really a pleasure to meet and compute with other homos such as myself. I plan on using my new Apple computer as a way to entice and recruit young schoolboys into the homosexual lifestyle. It would be so helpful if you could produce more software which would appeal to young boys. Thanks in advance.
with much gayness,
Father Randy "Pudge" O'Day, S.J.