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

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?

[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?

[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.

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.

only works if you've paid

[Enrico Pulatzo]

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

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: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.

(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

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.