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: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.