Slashdot Mirror
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.
geek friendly VPS's and free API enabled DNS : zerigo.com
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 ;)
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.
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.
Do you ever stop?
Evidently not. Why would I? My opinions have not changed.
All you ever say is that tabbed browsing is bad, and everyone is simply ignorant who thinks otherwise.
Actually, a few weeks back I posted several extremely lengthy and thorough critiques of tabbed browsing, none of which received an intelligent response. I don't know if you people aren't reading them, or what.
Either shut-up or do a scientific study on the usability of tabbed browsing and report it!!!
Well, I won't claim it was scientific, but I most certainly did report my analyses. I guess nobody on Slashdot is interested in facts. They're more interested in checking that "post anonymously" button and accusing each other of being trolls.
Which is fine. I just don't like to play that game myself, that's all.
I write in my journal
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!
Actually, Quake 2 was ported by Logicware (many of the Logicware employees went on to form Contraband Entertainment) for commercial release. The fine Fruits of the Dojo version of Quake 2 is based off of the GPL code for q2 which was released a bit later.
You are right however about Quake 3. And OmniGroup did get it basically up and running within a week or two. They can code OS X apps pretty much as well as any Apple employed developer I would imagine. They deserve a lot of credit for setting the example for good OS X apps.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!