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.

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.

only works if you've paid

[Enrico Pulatzo]

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

(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- Self fixing bookmarks (can redo its own pointer, if redirected on outdated bookmark)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.