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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."
I must say I am impressed... I had never thought Opera would be eclipsed in cool features, but there it is. Many of these things Opera should be doing right now.
Workspaces, for example. Opera has an integrated system for easily saving and restoring web sessions, and even features an undo for closing windows (yay!). But this feature is buried in a menu somewhere, requires an open / save dialog box, and generally could be a lot more intuitive. Despite having been in several iterations of the browser, few people have found it.
Site-specific preferences. People have wanted this for a long time now, and I'm glad to see someone is implementing it. Pity it wasn't Opera. Opera supports preference sets, and many of them contain site-specific information, but in no way can all preferences be set on a site-specific basis. From the description it sounds like you could, for example, set your Slashdot home page to be your user page. I may be reading this wrong... only February will tell.
Adding searches... This is just plain cool. While opera allows you to use one of many pre-defined searches through a variety of means (including typing "g " + subject into the address bar), adding any search would be a powerful and useful ability. Of course, Opera's more flexible interface would have to find ways to deal with this (an individual search bar? the agregate search bar? the address search method?), but it shouldn't be too difficult.
Sharing bookmarks on a LAN is both great and troublesome. How do you implement this easily and quickly in a Windows environment without Rendezvous?
Tabs aren't as big of a deal, honestly. Usually either you have few enough pages open that you can keep track of them by name, or you have so many open that thumbnails would be too cumbersome to use.
I've always been envious of OmniWeb's History Search ability, website update notifications, and inline spell checker. That latter is being addressed in opera 7.5, along with a few nifty other features. While I will continue to use Opera, not the least of which because I have a PC, OmniWeb appears to be shaping up to quite the must-have app. OmniWeb was originally slated to ship as the default browers for OSX. Now it looks like that was a great idea.
The ______ Agenda
Those are all good reasons. But none of them matter on the issue of horizontal vs. vertical.
My horizontal space is more valuable than my vertical space. Plus, a ton of space is wasted when you only have a few tabs, if you don't want/need thumbnails. If you can't have the standard tab format, as a horizontal bar, you lose. I am not saying this is a bad implementation -- on the contrary, I think it is the best thing I've seen in a browser since the introduction of tabs -- but I don't want to use it. Not on a regular basis, anyway.
My horizontal space is more valuable than my vertical space.
Really? My impression is that usually the opposite is true, since screens are wider than they are tall, especially with the proliferation of widescreen aspect ratios. You may have a point since Omniweb's drawer will take up more horizontal space than normal tabs take vertical space, but I'm still looking forward to giving it a try.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I really like how OmniWeb's so-called tabbed browsing looks. The problem comes with how much space that's going to use up. Doesn't the Omni Group realize that most people out there expand their browser window to be as big as possible? On your average 15" or so monitor (laptops, 15" panels, even the 17" monitors) space is at a premium. As for the workspace thing? It looks stupid. Who keeps little browser windows all over their desktop? I'll stick with Safari, or even Camino.
OmniWeb 4 was actually pretty stable and rendered fairly well even before they switched to using WebCore. The only thing that was really missing was some of the CSS support and some of the JavaScript stuff. The main problem the Omni Group had was that they were spending a lot of time chasing sloppy coding that worked in Internet Explorer because people only checked their code in Internet Explorer or they coded to some of the quirks in IE and that broke the rendering in other browers.
The Omni Group finally realized that they were trying to master too many disciplines and they were spending time re-inventing the wheel. They made a smart choice and decided to let someone else worry about rendering web content while they concentrated on solid UI and application design. The merging of the Omni Group's great UI-sense and KHTML's excellent rendering is a dream and they combine to make a wonderful product that is well-worth throwing a few bucks at. Not to mention that you can use the product indefinitely for free and all you'll see a single funny nag message out of a series of a dozen or so every few days.
Sapere aude!
But doesn't Safari do just that? Apple didn't write Safari's rendering engine from scratch. Apple chose to use WebCore, which was derived from KDE's KHTML code. They've been very good citizens by contributing code back to the KDE project, but they're still utilizing code that was developed by another group.
So why is it okay for Safari to "leap frog" and build upon the efforts of the KHTML development team, but not OmniWeb? What makes Safari an "honest effort" when they re-use code in the same way as Apple? Why should OmniWeb have to re-invent the wheel when there is already a stable rendering engine available for them to utilize?
If you want a web browser with a "niche market" that uses a proprietary rendering engine, look no further than Opera or Internet Explorer. But the re-use of WebCore makes OmniWeb a credible product, and frees up their developers' time to do other worthwhile things, such as fixing bugs and working on the stability of their program. Why should they have to waste time writing their own rendering engine?
I can understand your dislike for OmniWeb for their past track record of stability, but if you're going to critique their re-use of open source code, you'll need to come up with some far more convincing arguments.
Super ninja monkeys will one day rule the world!
I believe that, coming out of the whole NeXT tradition that invented the web browser, OmniWeb used a real SGML engine to parse the HTML applications that are called web pages, as you could tell by reading the status bar as pages loaded (SGMLObject parsing, or something; I've since updated to OW 4.5, with WebCore). True, this engine had trouble with many pages--that is, it did not accept as liberally as it could have--but I think that the twists and contortions that people put HTML through would have made even Jon Postel hang his head in shame.
He was a verray parfit gentil knight.
And we shouldn't forget. Omniweb was there first. Back when OS X was just out, there was only the hideous hideous IE5 (tragic since IE5/OS9 was the best browser of its time) and a nightmarish Netscape. OW was gorgeous and fast and showed everyone what a browser really should be like. Yeah, it had occasional crashes, but it was the best of the bunch. Except for the sick task of reverse-engineering all of IE's bugs. Leading to...
That's right, why use a standards-compliant free Apple standard Toolkit, when you can completely reinvent the wheel for no good reason other than to impress about ten people in the world who probably won't even register your product and will complain about how your URL field isn't adjusted right in your demo movie. While their at it, they should have written their own compilers, the cheating bastards.This isn't macho CS major dueling here. This is about creating useful software. Most of us are delighted they are using Webkit for rendering and thinking about other interface issues instead of wasting their time on rendering (which incidentally was killing their development efforts).
If you don't like it, don't use, or don't try it. But please don't try to say it's somehow dishonest or wimpy to use system toolkits.
Well, nothing was stopping them from using the KHTML libraries or one of the other open-source HTML rendering libraries that were out there even before Apple decided to do so.
..and they had the best rendering on the platform. If you have access to a Puma (10.1) system, have a look at IE and OmniWeb side by side.
I think you're underestimating just how much work it was to re-host KHTML from X windows to Quartz 2D.
they stuck with their own internal renderers until the holy grail came along with Apple's announcements of WebCore and JavaScriptCore.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."