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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 DOES NOT suck. You mentioned the excellent cookie handling (agreed), but forget the incredible page rendering quality, awesome bookmarking system (providing constant feedback on redirected, updated and broken links), excellent window handling (fuck tabs - give me open behind and save window size ANY day), superb form filling (excellent rendering with aspell supported properly and now, zoomed text boxes too).
Omniweb loses out on IE and CSS support, I agree - but MY online banking still prefers it to any other browser, and Safari's timeouts really do BORE me now.
That was classic intercourse!
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
Tabbed browsing is a horrible idea anyway. It harkens to the Windows UI idea of having document windows within the program window. Each window is supposed to be a single document. Each page open in a separate window is a much better UI paradigm.
The one thing I missed when I switched from iCab to OmniWeb was the fine-grained control over picture loading, although I believe they took that out of iCab in the more recent versions. You could block based on image pixel size, if the image server or path matched a wildcard expression (e.g. block all images that come from ads.* servers, or that have /ads/ in their path), or whether or not the image came from the same server as the page did.
You may not like tabbed browsing, and if not, all is well for you as you have more browsers to pick from, but tabbed browser windows are far from a horrible idea. In fact I think it is one of the few really great UI ideas I have seen in the browser world in a long time.
Just because Windows started the MDI thing long ago does not make tabbed browsing awful. The fact is that Windows simply had a really horrible implemetation of MDI. Windows inside of windows - eeew. Tabs are intutive, easy to use, and most implementations are well though out. They improve performance, and help to organize content that otherwise can get out of control. I used to hate having tons of browser windows open, and having to cascade them just so, so that I could go back and forth between the slew of pages I need to have open at work - now I use Chimera and am much happier.
I realize that folks have various issues with them, some contrived, some genuine, but they do solve a usability problem I have suffered under for years better than any other solution I have seen yet. If you do not like them, great for you, you need not use them. For me, I can't live without them, and I will never use a browser that does not support tabs unless something better comes along that solves the same problem as elegantly.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
The problem is that is *isn't* fully functional. If it were, it would render CSS 1 and 2 correctly. As it stands, iCab does a pretty poor job of CSS. The features of the browser are pretty cool though.
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
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 ;)
"Uh, what? Yeah "opening behind" is okay but Safari does that and no matter what, it's not tabbed browsing."
If you need tabbed browsing, you're using the wrong window manager. Mac OSX may not be as good as OS9, but it's a damn site better than anything else (Living products, that is).
I didn't even bother going into Omniweb's other great features like it's excellent page junk filtration, voice control (try it! it actually makes sense), excellent source editor (lovely tag highlighting - where's that in Safari?). Face it - Omniweb is a true 'power' browser - albeit one that's undermined by it's laggardly standards support. It's certainly a better long term productivity aid than anything else I've used.
That was classic intercourse!
Quick, identify which of the following tabs is for slashdot.org, which is for apple.com, and which is for sourceforge.net. To make this realistic, I have shortened the names to the length that you would normally see them in a browser such as Chimera.
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
[and so on, all the way to]
20)
Ironically enough, where tabbed browsing would be most useful is where it becomes least practical to use.
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.
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.
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!