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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."
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!
The oldest was called Nexus, also simply known as WorldWideWeb.app by Tim Berners-Lee. But OmniWeb is probably the oldest that survived.
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.
Hopefully they will use WebKit in OW5 and get all of that work done for free by Apple and concentrate on making a great interface.
I don't actually think you have to use the word "hopefully" here. Just a day or two after Safari and WebCore were released, Case announced that OmniGroup would be using the WebCore foundation for the next major release of OmniWeb. Whether he's talking about WebKit or some kind of home-grown wrapper around WebCore is unclear, but the gist of it is that OmniGroup won't have to screw around with HTML rendering or JavaScript execution any more.
Case made the point really well in the very first interview question. He said that Safari is for people who use the default browser that comes with the OS, and that Apple is rightly trying to make that default browser as great as they can. OmniWeb, though, is aimed at people who aren't happy with the default browser. Two totally different points of focus.
I write in my journal
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 ;)
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.