OmniWeb Announces 5.0 Browser

wcbrown writes "OmniGroup, makers of the popular Mac OS X browser OmniWeb have announced the upcoming beta of their next-generation browser. There's going to be tabs and they're not like any other browser out there. There's going to be a way to save and share your browsing state so you can restore your window locations and the URLs in them. There's going to be some cool nice-to-haves like integrated RSS reading, per-site preferences, and search shortcuts. The beta will be available February 2, 2004."

Comments

Tabbing system

[xyrw]

When I first saw the way Omni had implemented tabs in OW, I thought they were trying to be different for its own sake.

On this thread, Tim2, who's on the team at Omni, explains the reasoning behind their tabs implementation (vertical tabbing, drawer as opposed to hotlist a la Mozilla). I reproduce it here:

So, there have been some people wondering why we chose to use a drawer instead of just doing the more traditional Safari/Mozila thing. Here's the deal with the drawer:

• I've found that thumbnails generally convey much more useful information than page titles. Most page titles are junk anyway (go to eBay and you'll see what I mean). I can switch between tabs much more accurately when I can actually see the page I'm switching to. And in those cases where the thumbnail really is not a distinguishing factor, such as when multiple tabs are open to these forums, then the page title is usually enough supplimentary information for me to figure it out.
• The tabs were put vertically in a drawer for a number of reasons:
• First, you can get more vertical space in a drawer than in an in-window sidebar. This is because the drawer overlaps the main window's toolbar, while a view inside the window could only stretch from the bottom of the toolbar to the bottom of the window. That's like 50 extra pixels.
• Second, they are oriented vertically instead of horizontally so that you don't have to deal with truncated page titles if you don't want to. If you load fifty tabs in Safari, they will have incomprehensibly short titles and will run off the end of the window. OmniWeb does not have this problem. It's also easier on your eyes to scan a list of items that are arranged in rows (as opposed to Safari's single row, multiple column implementation). On top of all that, you can view more tabs at once than you can with Safari -- In OmniWeb's list mode, I can create 20 tabs in a single window before a scroll bar appears (this is on my dinky 12" PowerBook). In Safari, however, I can only fit 11 tabs in a window before they start running off the screen into that annoying menu thing.
• And finally, you can hide and show a drawer without having to resize the content area of the window. If we put the tabs in an in-window side bar, then we would have to resize the page every time the tab sidebar was hidden or shown. This can have detrimental effects on page layout and can make the user feel cramped, especially when reading pages which lay out best when the window is wide.

Essentially, the Omni implementation scales better with a large number of tabs. This is the first great improvement to tabbed browsing that I have seen in a long time. I can definitely see myself $30 for this thing.

Re:Tabbing system

[bar-agent]

You must not have noticed that you can turn the thumbnails off, and just show the window titles in a vertical list.

Re:Tabbing system

[Graff]

Now you want me to try and find the story I want by choosing one from a bunch of identical images? No thanks, the blurb in the page title is at least *unique*, I'd like to go by that, please.

If you look at the implementation that OmniWeb 5 is using you will see that it gives you the choice of using either thumbnails or titles. This choice is good because there are many sites that use identical titles for their pages, even when the content is different. With the choice of thumbnails or titles, the user is in control of how they use the "tab" interface that OmniWeb 5 will have.

Re:Obligatory Opera comment

[rylin]

Sharing bookmarks on a LAN is both great and troublesome. How do you implement this easily and quickly in a Windows environment without Rendezvous?

You use IE along with a shared directory, since bookmarks are stored as simple files
*GRIN*!

Mirror

[CowboyMeal]

omniwebtabs.mp4
workspaces.mov

Re:Tabbing

[bar-agent]

Sigh. Thumbnails are optional. You can just show the window titles in a vertical list. Watch the movie.

Re:A lesson for the non-khtml world.

[shawnce]

Apple made Web Kit a public framework as of Mac OS X 10.2.7/8 (around Oct. 2003).

This page covers how to use it.

As of Panther you can even create a functional web browser in Cocoa without writing a single line of code, this includes backwards/forwards navigation controls, other common controls, etc. To do this you simply drag and drop elements into a window/view in Interface Builder and wire up a few things graphically... you don't even need to compile it to use it. (I tried it myself for the fun of it, it takes less then 5 mins)

Apple is also using Web Kit for various things other then Safari in Panther, like the help viewer, Xcode, etc. Third parties are also quickly starting to use it for imbedded HTML display.

Rather cool.

Re:block partial conent?

[Graff]

I was asking if in order to be one of the developers - making plug-ins and whatnot required one to pay.

OmniWeb can use the same plug-ins that work on Mozilla or Netscape. So I would say no, you don't need to pay to develop for OmniWeb.

Re:Stingy Location Bar

[burns210]

for your rendering needs in omniweb. Omniweb uses webcore, the rendering engine for Safari, which is based on KHTML, the HTML redering engine in KDE.

Re:block partial conent?

[jcr]

2) Ad blocking

Omni led the way on this. Years ago, I asked Ken Case to give me a way to block all URL's that matched a given regex, and they put it in.

They then took the extra step and implemented blocking of any URLs that didn't come from the same host as the page, URLs for images that matched the standard ad sizes, etc.

One other thing I love about OW is its ability to set cookie handling preferences per site. By default, I take the cookies and toss them out every time I quit the app. There are just a few sites I'll keep cookies for across sessions (/., my bank, and my employer's internal pages), but all the rest of them get pitched.

-jcr

Re:Mac MSIE?

[phatsharpie]

MS had dropped development of IE for Mac OS X since June of 2003.

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,111158 ,0 0.asp

-B

Re:OmniWeb Tabs

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah, I agree that the behavior makes sense -- the misfeature in Safari is that it doesn't leave that null space for opening new tabs.

Yes it does, AFAICT. Before your tabs overflow into the menu thing, there's several pixels to the right of the last tab into which you can drag links. Once you get the menu thingy with the >> arrows, you can drag links onto the >> and you'll get a new tab with the link.

HTH