OmniWeb Announces WebCore-Based Browser

mwelty writes "OmniWeb 4.5sp1 (sneaky peek one) was announced today, and as far as I know this is the first major browser application for Mac OS X that is embedding Apple's Open Source WebCore and JavaScriptCore. As many /. readers might recall, Apple released Safari in January at MWSF, which it based on the KHTML codebase, and has since been releasing their WebCore and JavaScriptCore to developers regularly."

Comments

Removed features?

[Gogo Dodo]

Since I don't have a licensed copy of OmniWeb, can somebody list what features have been removed from the previous versions?

For example, I really like the Error Log so I can see what the server and browser are sending back and forth (Yes, I know about the recent /. article on using Mozilla to debug, but OmniWeb is just easier for me to use).

Unmistakeably good news

[CodeBitch]

I'll be publishing an analysis of how well they've done, and updating the MacEdition guide to CSS2 support in Mac-only browsers in the next few days.

Suffice to say for now that this is unmistakeably good news

--CodeBitch

Try it for yourself

[stere0]

The .dmg is here. This is their disclaimer/readme.

Re:Try it for yourself

[iMMersE]

Note, you will need a valid license for Omniweb to start ...

what's MS gonna do?

[BortQ]

The way I see it Microsoft has three options:

1. Ditch the mac IE
2. Put out a cocoa IE using WebCore.
3. Put out a cocoa IE using their own kick ass renderer

If they go with 1 it would be a real shame, as IE for macintosh was actually a fine browser (it blows away all competition in classic-land). For some reason I just can't see them going with option 2, it isn't the MS way. So I vote for option 3. This would really rev up the browser war, with three separate rendering engines and a multitude of GUIs around them.

I'm doubtful that MS can out-render Apple on their own turf though...

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[Twirlip of the Mists]

IE for macintosh was actually a fine browser (it blows away all competition in classic-land).

I think you're confused. IE 5 for Mac OS 9 was a great browser that blew away all competition everywhere, at the time. It was the most standards-compliant browser available when it debuted, and it was rock-solid stable to boot.

But IE 5 for Mac OS X is just crap. It's unbelievably slow, and unbelievably buggy. It fails to load pages for apparently no reason at what seems to be random. It goes catatonic when faced with a proxy server that works fine with other browsers. And, of course, it still uses old-school font rendering, which just adds insult to injury.

I fired up IE for OS X just a few days ago to visit a web site that stauchly refused to work with anything else. It was the first time I'd run it in at least a year. I've been using Safari full-time since the day it came out, and before that it was OmniWeb. First thing I saw? After the oh-so-1993 splash screen, I mean? A giant alert box that said, "The file could not be found." Faced with little choice, I clicked "OK," but I had to ask myself, "What file? Was it an important file? Who was looking for the file, exactly?" I did what I had to do and got the hell out of IE-land as fast as I could.

(Turns out it was an error in my preferences. I had IE pointed to a home page that didn't exist any more. Why it ignored the system-wide preference in favor of its own is a mystery that I shall save for another day.)

Long story short: whichever of the three options Microsoft might choose, I doubt most Mac OS X users will ever even hear about it.

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[FaasNat]

Well, competition inspires innovation. I don't think Microsoft is a company to easily give up. Not sure if future versions of IE will be cocoa based, but I'm sure they will be working their butts off to have something to compete against Safari.

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[JonathanBoyd]

I think you're confused. IE 5 for Mac OS 9 was a great browser [...] But IE 5 for Mac OS X is just crap.

Actually, he did say that he was in classic land, which I'm guessing means OS9 since you'd have to be mad to run a browser in classic when there are so many good native ones. Then again, maybe he is nuts and my pedanticism is pointless today.

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[selderrr]

I don't think theu'll support the OSX version of IE for very long anymore. MSN might hold out a little while longer, but even MSH will die withing a few years IMHO.

And that's not a good thing. We all know that MS would really like to abandon the mac platform : even though the mac office suite still makes money for MS, they know that due to slipping mac marketshare plus slipping office marketshare on mac will slowly make the MBU a loss-only division.

With Apple bringing out more and more software that directly competes with MS, i fear that MS will leave the mac path entirely.

This is bad because : a) competition is a good thing. b) subjective perception of no MS Office on mac will turn down potential corporate buyers. c) Office v. X is a good piece of software (albeit bloated)

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[Zane Edwards]

IE 5 for Mac OS 9 was a great browser that blew away all competition everywhere, at the time.

But then again, IE only had one great version for Classic. Remember, IE 4.5 for Classic was crap also. But that was back when me and ALL my friends used Netscape.

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[TwP]

Hmmm . . . does it make sense to expend resources for less than 1% of the market? Of all the personal computers out there only 3% - 5% are Macs. If there are already several other browsers for the platform - Safari, Camino, OmniWeb, Mozilla - how much market share is Microsoft really going to get? And to what advantage?

Yes, there are some websites out there that will only render under IE5 [sarcasm] let's hear it for standards on the web [/sarcasm], but does Microsoft really care about the million or so OSX users who might want to see those websites? It just doesn't make business sense to do anything innovative for so little returns.

Now I'm going to turn into Mr. Conspiracy Theory, but the only reason MS invested into Apple financially and supported IE5 and Office on the OSX paltform was to keep the DoJ off its back. Now that Apple is coming out with their own browser and, according to the rumor sites, their own Office suite, do you think Microsoft is really going to invest the time and money to support the competition?

Microsoft needs Apple, but they don't need Apple to take away their market share.

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[BortQ]

I agree, IE for OSX sucks hard. But you have to remember that Microsoft put it out back in the 10.0 days. It was just a quick carbonization of the classic version.

Since then there really haven't been any updates to it, while the OS has changed considerably. So what has MS been doing all this time? Either sitting on their asses, or fixing up IE so it's as good as it was in classic.

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[valkraider]

does it make sense to expend resources for less than 1% of the market?

A lot of successful companies started out doing just that. In fact, it only takes a few small moves for the 1% to become 75%. Besides, even the 1% is a good amount of people and $$$.

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[Melantha_Bacchae]

selderr wrote:

> With Apple bringing out more and more software that
> directly competes with MS, i fear that MS will leave the
> mac path entirely.

Gee, I hope so. This G4 iMac is Microsoft free (has been for about a year), and I am really happy about it.

> b) subjective perception of no MS Office on mac will turn
> down potential corporate buyers.

Objective perception of no Licensing 6 on Mac will attract corporate buyers, along with ease of use, Windows and Linux compatibility, and solid support. Thanks to Licensing 6 poisoning companies against Microsoft products, there is increasing interest out there for alternatives. Sometimes Microsoft's all-consuming greed does work against them. (BTW, yes I know companies are supposed to make a profit. When they make a profit by offering good value for your money, I call that being "prosperous". When they make a profit by extortion, I call that "greed'.)

As for office suites, there is AppleWorks, Open Office (still runs under the X window system, but Apple's X server makes it almost as easy as running under Classic), Star Office (when Open Office port makes it all the way to Aqua), and Think Free. Apple has many of the pieces of a professional level office suite out there, it is only missing a word processor and a spread sheet. There are also X programs such as AmiPro and KOffice, and an old Classic version of WordPerfect. If MS Office would go away, Corel might be persuaded to re-port WordPerfect (and maybe even its suite).

> c) Office v. X is a good piece of software (albeit bloated)

I wouldn't know that. Last time I ran Office on the Mac was the previous version. I tried something simple with it (forget what) and it crashed, taking down Classic and giving the Finder such hysterics that I had to reboot. I tried the same thing in AppleWorks, and it worked just fine. I uninstalled Office and haven't used it on a Mac since (and see no reason to pay a large bet that the next version is better). It has been years since I used IE.

"At this moment, it has control of systems all over the world.
And...we can't do a damn thing to stop it."
Miyasaka, "Godzilla 2000 Millennium" (Japanese version)

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what has MS been doing all this time? Either sitting on their asses, or fixing up IE so it's as good as it was in classic.

Safari was a big "fuck you" from apple to MS. I doubt we'll see another major IE/Mac update, ever. And quite frankly, I don't mind that one bit. I have 6 web browsers installed on my mac (Safari, Camino, Mozilla, Opera, Phoenix, IE) and one less will still leave plenty of competition. I don't even have iCab or OmniWeb, so really I could have eight browsers installed if I wanted. Competition is a beautiful thing.

I haven't used OmniWeb in a long time, because the rendering engine's idea of CSS was quite outlandish. Now that they've got WebCore, I'd like to give it a try... But alas, I don't have a liscense, so I can't.

That reminds me... Did they just release a closed-source KHTML browser that isn't (currently) even free-as-in-beer much less speech?! Can they do that?

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not 1%. Maybe less than 4% of all computer sales are macs, but only 1% of web browsing being done from a mac? I somehow doubt it.

% computers sold in a quarter != % of users

Re:what's MS gonna do?

[voixderaison]

What about...

4. Put some amount of energy into improving the Carbon based MSIE, and keep it tracking the features of the Windows MSIE.

Microsoft probably doesn't even notice the "browser wars" on Mac OS X. Given the relative size of the market, it's more like a bar fight than a riot even, much less a war.

Apple, on the other hand, was almost certainly suffering on the sales front. Several different browser projects on the platform failed to produce a single competative browser, as compared to those available on Windows. They really needed to get a competive browser onto the sales floor and into the forum discussions.

With desperation providing acute incentive, somebody at Apple came up with a brilliant idea on how to fix that problem in a really interesting way -- based on an open source library that could be used for other browsers, and other non-browser software packages, too.

It seems to be working, with discussion comments like "Sarfari is blindingly fast" rather than, "Mac OS X is infuriatingly slow".

Does it still cost money?

[dave1212]

Guess it does..

US $29.95 to be exact..

Does it have enough unique features to compete with any of the freeware browsers?

(other than for those who can't/won't download, and would buy a boxed browser)

I'm reading more about it now, and might try the trial version.

Re:Does it still cost money?

[bmerlin]

Unfortunately, there is no trial version of OmniWeb 4.5 sneakypeeks. You need a real license, which is a bunch of crap, IMO.

Re:Does it still cost money?

[Ponty]

Yes, it should be totally free like every other version of OmniWeb they've ever put out and any defiation from that generosity is a bunch of crap.

Trial version of a sneakypeek? One might think that the preview is a trial version. And why shouldn't they require a license, anyway?

Sheesh.

First impressions

[stere0]

I am posting this with OmniWeb 4.5sp1.

As a matter of fact, the WebCore engine doesn't seem to make it very fast. Is there any way I can make automated, scientific testing? On a dual 1.2 Ghz G4, The Onion takes about 11 seconds to display with Omniweb, which isn't faster than Safari v60. Mozilla 1.4a with http pipelining enabled takes about 8.

On a sidenote, there are some nice new features. Those I've noticed so far are a new download manager and a manual pop-up "Form Editor" that can be used for typing text in a -- you have to try it for yourself. These may already have been implemented in 4.2, which I haven't tried.

I haven't noticed any features missing from the previous versions. In another comment, Gogo Dodo asked whether the Error Log was still here. It is, and it's quite verbose, as can be expected from a beta.

I hope we will see some good features in the next Omniweb release. It's a very nice browser but not having tabs is a pain. Compared to something like Mozilla, it is often quite unpractical.

Re:First impressions

[Twirlip of the Mists]

On a dual 1.2 Ghz G4, The Onion takes about 11 seconds to display with Omniweb, which isn't faster than Safari v60.

I think there might be something wrong with your setup. I'm using a dual 1 GHz G4, and Safari v. 60, and "The Onion" takes about three seconds to render their main page once you get past that interstitial ad thing.

To do a more scientific test, try it against a locally stored HTML file instead of against a web site. That way you'll separate the renderer from the network code, or at least as much as you can.

Re:First impressions

[bpbond]

I think there's a big speedup with WebCore--no, it's not as fast (or rendering as correctly) as Safari, but a lot better than OW4.2. OmniWeb has always had a beautiful interface, great preferences, but been s-l-o-w.

Side note: the "prevent JavaScript from opening new windows" preference appears to be broken in this beta, so be prepared for site ads to reappear.

Re:First impressions

[GMontag]

when the heck are you getting back from Ireland and assume your normal duties of "wordiest JE poster of the psuedo-Conservative faction" :-)

Re:First impressions

[Anonymous Coward]

pls hury bak from vakatiun and be saef pls thx nik stil not ok

Re:First impressions

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like twirlip really did call it quits. Too bad.

Re:First impressions

[dpt]

I assume he couldn't take being proven wrong publically, and fucked off for good. Of course, he would blame everyone else for this as he is a coward.

Alternatively, if he truly was an astroturfer (*), his masters realized that he had been seen through, and so he was recalled.

(*) The only real alternative, given the number of postings, is that he was on welfare. Which would certainly explain a lot. Or perhaps a law student - they have lots of spare time, given the less than challenging nature of their coursework.

Re:First impressions

[dpt]

Yes, one less idiot to run circles around ... looks like he couldn't take being wrong on even one single technical point, and ran away with his tail between his legs.

Re:First impressions

[Anonymous Coward]

I can say with high confidence that I never saw anybody "run circles" around twirlip in any argument.

Re:First impressions

[dpt]

You should try following more closely. He's just a sore loser.

only works if you've paid

[Enrico Pulatzo]

in other words, you can't try it unless you've used their older versions. bummer

Re:only works if you've paid

[Gogo Dodo]

Hopefully, it is only a Sneaky Peek restriction and not a sign of how things will be when 4.5 is in beta/release. I hope Omnigroup sticks to the current licensing model.

Re:only works if you've paid

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, you can get a one day trial license from Omni's site.. I'm pretty sure it's in the store section...

First of its kind

[absurdhero]

To my knowledge, this is the first non-free(as in beer) commercial browser derived in any way from khtml. Omni must be pretty confident that webcore is a solid and advantagous choice for the future of omniweb. This says something about the maturity of khtml.

Re:First of its kind

[Anonymous Coward]

> To my knowledge, this is the first non-free(as
> in beer) commercial browser derived in any way
> from khtml. Omni must be pretty confident that
> webcore is a solid and advantagous choice for
> the future of omniweb. This says something
> about the maturity of khtml.

I think it says more about the corner Omni had painted them in (writing a simple browser is fun; writing a fully compliant browser is lots of hard work). Omniweb was behind in CSS support, and not moving faster than the competition

Any reasons to use OmniWeb?

[finnatic]

Can anyone provide me with any reasons to download and maybe use Omniweb?

Is there anything it does that Moz / MSIE / Safari doesn't do?

What are its advantages?

Re:Any reasons to use OmniWeb?

[Trurl's Machine]

Can anyone provide me with any reasons to download and maybe use Omniweb? Is there anything it does that Moz / MSIE / Safari doesn't do? What are its advantages?

A minor advantage, but quite important for iBook/powerbook users: it's the only Mac browser REALLY designed with single-button mouse in mind. On Safari or Explorer, you have to press ctrl to get contextual menu. OmniWeb gets contextual after a "longer click", which is very easy to learn. Also, many things (manage bookmarks, download link, download image etc.) are readily available without the contextual menu, e.g. by drag'n'drop.
But personally, I use Safari and 3-button cordless mouse :-)

Re:Any reasons to use OmniWeb?

[capmilk]

When Apple released Safari, the Omni guys posted a comment somewhere that answered precisely that question. I am really sorry but I don't have a URL at hand.

The essence of the statement was that OmniWeb's main bonus has always been its very nice GUI and pretty comfortable approach to things. The Omni folks said, their chance with WebCore would be that they would no longer have to put a huge amount of work into a rendering engine that has always been, well, worse than the others on the market. Rather they seemed glad that with official frameworks for rendering HTML and parsing JavaScript, they could focus on adding more killer features to their application.

Re:Any reasons to use OmniWeb?

[gozar]

A minor advantage, but quite important for iBook/powerbook users: it's the only Mac browser REALLY designed with single-button mouse in mind. On Safari or Explorer, you have to press ctrl to get contextual menu. OmniWeb gets contextual after a "longer click", which is very easy to learn.

AFAIK, most Mac browser do this. In fact, I just noticed that Safari doesn't, but Mozilla and IE both do.

Re:Any reasons to use OmniWeb?

[repetty]

No, I won't provide any reasons to you.

Download it and check it out yourself, you lazy bastard.

--Richard

Re:Any reasons to use OmniWeb?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here are my favorite OmniWeb-only features (maybe they exist elsewhere... but not in browsers I have tried, or at least not as well done):

- Preference for not loading suspected advertisement images, customizable with regexes for sites not to load from and can also base the decision on hueristics about the size of the image (ie hmm... that looks like its exactly the size of a standard banner ad)

- Great and potentially very detailed cookie management.

- Pop-up window blocking (ok this one certainly isn't completely unique, and I guess someone already said that this is currently broken in the 4.5 prereleases)

- The new (in 4.2) separate-window form text area editing option is awesome. Especially if you work with wiki-like systems where you do a lot of editing of relatively large amounts of text in a form.

Re:Any reasons to use OmniWeb?

[Anonymous Coward]

omni has been the finest in interface since the days of next. they will continue to do as well as apple and better in terms of interface. they are awesome at it and will continue to be. most of the os x community should know they are awesome by now,

Re:Any reasons to use OmniWeb?

[DeeKay]

Besides the already mentioned features (by Bwanazuila), i personally consider these pretty handy:

-FULL drag & drop support. And when i say full i mean full! Drag Text or Links into formfields, drag images onto Photoshop or any other App (Dock or elsewhere) or somewhere on your Harddrive if you prefer. Just great, i don't understand why there is NO other Browser that's able to do that, not even Apples own Safari!

-Shortcuts were already mentioned, and they're really a boon, i have shortcuts for everything! To search on eBay i enter "e [string]", to search on slashdot "s [string]", i have various search-shortcuts for sites i regularly visit (and search!) like The Register, a German/English translation service (no, not Babelfish, that unfortunately won't work with shortcuts due to its nature!), an encyclopedia, Google images, the Apple Knowledgebase and (very important) Versiontracker. You can put whatis.com in there or Google groups or Google Dictionary or whatever you want! Really great, i would never use a browser anymore that didn't have shortcuts, sorry no Safari here! Luckily Camino also implemented shortcuts and i actually prefer their implementation via the bookmarks to OmniWebs!

-A network monitor where you can see which parts of your page take the longest to load

-A log of HTTP-Requests and errors

-An Information-Window that shows you the structure of a site in a tree with Information on every element: creation dates, byte-sizes, dimensions and thumbnails of images etc.

-FULL contextual menues. The other browsers just don't measure up! Only OW has the complete set (Camino is getting close though!)! If i have a href'd image, i can copy the image's link to the buffer, the image's URL or the image itself! I frequently need all 3, so OW is the only choice!

-Perfect Font-Rendering for ALL fonts! Camino only does Arial properly and already balks on small Times new Roman

-REAL Aqua-Widgets! Camino fakes them, although they look okay mostly...

-A pretty useful HTML-Editor with highlighting and editing-capabilities

-URL-bar filtering of spaces, linebreaks and tabs. Camino also has this now. Very useful for non-href'd long links like you frequently get them in emails or find them in some forums. I don't get it why all other browsers still also copy linebreaks - There IS no linebreak in an URL!

-Services-Support:
-I can highlight a link, press Apple-Shift-U and it opens a new window with the link.
-I can let it read text of a webpage for me
-I can use any other Service, like e.g. Devon's WordService to reformat Text in a Formfield, change to CAPS or remove them, remove linebreaks, capitalize the first letters of words or give me a statistic on how many words, lines and letters are in a highlighted text.

-New in 4.2: Linky-thing to Textedit in Formfields, so you can do your editing in Textedit and it gets automatically passed on into the formfield. Neato!

Summing up, OW is the single most feature-rich browser ever, and the features are very nice and mostly very handy! You can see all the time that its makers really did try to think of useful improvements for the user, and it's as OSX-like and -embracing as can be (even beats Safari!). I tried it when OS X came out and i fell in love with it. Only due to its amazingly slow table-rendering and poor CSS/Javascript support i was basically forced to switch to Camino by now, which is also nice, but not THAT nice! ;-) Most of its cool new features are taken from Omniweb anyway!
Hence i can't wait for OW 4.5 with proper speed and compliance, i'll definately switch back as soon as it's released!

Still no tabs

[kwo]

Neither OmniWeb nor Safari nor IE support tabbed browsing. OnmiGroup and Apple have plans to incorporate that into their browsers. Microsoft - who knows. The first KHTML-based tabbed browser will be my browser of choice.

Here's the rundown so far:
Safari - free, no tabs, KHTML
OmniWeb - commercial, no tabs, KHTML
IE - free, no tabs, MS rendering engine
Camino - free, tabs, Gecko
Opera - commercial, tabs, Opera rendering engine

Re:Still no tabs

[mTor]

All newer builds of Safari have had tabs. Latest leaked version is v71.

Nothing...

[Bwanazulia]

I am now using SP2 and I have seen nothing "removed" from 4.2.

There are a few things that are not working 100%, but that is why it is a SP.

BZ

Finally Flash in OS X

[abacsalmasi]

I've been only testing it for about 5 minutes now and it's decent. The biggest thing I noticed was it's ability to handle Flash. My own site is very Flash intensive and neither Camino or Safari vs.71 can handle it all without stuttering, but the new OmniWeb sure does it well. If anybody wants to test it out (feel free to use my my site because not many other sites will be this prominent) and test it with Safari/Camino first and then OmniWeb. A HUGE difference.

Re:Finally Flash in OS X

[Ponty]

Your site looks great in Safari 67. That's after having it open for several days browsing (sometimes it slows down considerably after prolonged usage.)

Framerates are high and animation is smooth. The sound was well-synced and there were no stutters.

Re:Finally Flash in OS X

[abacsalmasi]

Safari handles it well but with OmniWeb there is a huge speed improvement. I'm assuming it's running at 30fps in Omni and it's very noticeable. You have to see the 2 side by side and then you will see a big difference.

Re:Finally Flash in OS X

[jo_ham]

I can see the odd stutter here and there in Camino 0.7 on 10.2.4, iBook 600Mhz, 384Mb

If my humble iBook can manage it, everything should be able to!

Looks good.

You forgot a few

[knoxer]

Mozilla, free, tabs, Gecko Phoenix, free, tabs, Gecko iCab, (free?), (no tabs?), (?) There may be more....

Re:You forgot a few

[Anonymous Coward]

IBrowse and Voyager.

(posted over at MacNN first)

[Bwanazulia]

Here are some others (off the top of my head now that I sit in front of an NT workstation).

Bookmarks:
- Self updating (can check for changes ever X min/hour/day/week and highlights when changed)
- Self fixing bookmarks (can redo its own pointer, if redirected on outdated bookmark)
- Object oriented (a folder with an update time on it will update all of the bookmarks in the folder)
- Filter on dead bookmarks (shows list of all dead bookmarks, great for cleanup)
- Shows updated bookmarks in dock
- Dock icon is clickable to updated bookmarks
- Go to next new bookmark button
- Can pick folder for new bookmarks to be added to

Customizable
- Toolbar (unlike Safari) can be customized like any other cocoa app
- Can make it very small which is good for powerbooks with limited vertical space

Download manager
- Respects where to download to
- Shows progress
- Can stay in the background

Other
- Spell checking (works, always, first)
- Very cool search on bookmark and history titles
- Best ad blocking around (size and string based */ads/*)
- Click link to open window behind
- Tons of contextual features like "Save all links" and "Save all images")
- Shortcuts that allow you to do quick things like "gg slash" and it will search for slash at google

What I want to see in OW 5.0
- Some sort of tabbed thingy (rumors are they are working on a new type of tabs)
- Diplay favicons in toolbar and in bookmarks
- More goodies...

BZ

Isn't this a GPL violation?

[Anonymous Coward]

I need to BUY a LICENSE CODE for free software??? Isn't this a violation of the GPL?

Re:Isn't this a GPL violation?

[Ponty]

No. The free software is part of the OS. This is a program that uses the convenient libraries provided by the OS. Conveniently, KHTML is LGPL, so that's perfectly valid. Get over it.

Infact, it's so sneaky ....

[Greedo]

... they've already released 4.5sp2

Changelog:

4.5sp2 Thursday, April 10, 2003

OmniWeb 4.5sp2 contains the following changes since 4.5sp1

* Corrected a problem that could result in some windows not auto-sizing correctly (probably most noticeable when opening new windows)
* We now cache font metrics rather than recalculating them each time we need them, This should help speed up rendering in some cases as well as resizing of windows.
* We now save the "continuous spell checking enabled" setting to preferences when you leave a text area, and restore it from preferences when you enter one.
* Speech Recognition has been completely disabled for now, the preference setting for this is not honored.

Why Cocoa?

[Millennium]

Honest question: why would any update to IE they might make have to be Cocoa? It's possible to embed WebCore without using Cocoa, after all.

Re:Why Cocoa?

[BortQ]

The real truth of the matter is that for an application to really fit in with OS X it has to be cocoa. Just by using cocoa you get a whole wackload of stuff for free. Since all the other cocoa apps get this stuff as well it acts the same across different applications.

With carbon applications either you stick out like a sore thumb, or you try and recreate all the cocoa stuff (and that isn't always possible).

Apple is trying as hard as possible to get everyone to ditch carbon and move to cocoa. That's where all of their efforts are going. A large part of why OS X explorer sucked was because it was a carbon app.

Re:Why Cocoa?

[DeeKay]

Actually, that's not fully true!
IE on OS X sucked predominantly because it was POORLY carbonized and because it still relied on the slow Open Transport because of OS9-Compatibility!

Please don't forget that Camino's Gecko-Renderer, which is generally regarded as a close second best to Safari in Speed is actually Carbon! They didn't rewrite this huge Rendering-Engine from C++ to Cocoa's ObjC just for Camino!
It was called Chimera once, and as we all know a chimera is a beast with the body of one animal and the head of another! Chimera had a Carbon-"Body" (the Gecko-rendering engine!) and a Cocoa-"Head" (The Interface!)..

Carbon-Apps can be just as fast as Cocoa-Apps (or even faster - compare OmniWeb's speed to Camino!), it's really all just down to how much you optimize your application... The 2 languages are closely intertwined anyway by now, Carbon got DisplayPDF and services support by now, and the 2 rely on the same Libraries in quite a few occasions, so it's not as big a difference as many people constantly proclaim it to be!..

Re:Why Cocoa?

[adjusting]

They didn't rewrite this huge Rendering-Engine from C++ to Cocoa's ObjC just for Camino!

It is possible to mix C++ and Cocoa(In fact KHTML is C++)

It's called Objective-C++

IE on OS 9 is slow compared to Mozilla

[metamatic]

IE isn't just slow on OS X. On an 8500/180, Mozilla 1.3 is easily twice as fast as IE 5.