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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."
They look quite weak from that video. They aren't nearly as useful as regular tabs (a la Mozilla, Safari et. al), as a matter of fact Omni's take on "tabs" reminds me of a glorified "Page Holder" from IE 5 for Mac OS 9. My real question is what does OmniWeb have to offer? It's using Apple's WebKit last time I checked, so it's not a new rendering engine that they have to give, no *REAL* tabbed browsing (which is what I want) so no dice there. I understand more choices are good yadda yadda yadda and all that jazz, but my question still stands, what does OmniWeb have to offer the end user?
Are you secure enough in your masculinity to run 'man touch'?
heh, ServiceHolder ( http://www.serviceholder.com ) did it first. Funny.
Apple does seem to have gotten sloppy with terminology once again. They can't call a component "JavaScriptCore" -- technically and legally, "JavaScript" can only describe the Netscape implementation of the language. The generic term is ECMAScript. Anyone taking bets on how long before Time-Warner's lawyers notice the trademark infringment?
There's a lesson here for those of us stuck with Gecko, Opera, or the mysterious combination of undocumented engines that is Internet Explorer. You want standardization, you gotta have open-source components. W3C puts a lot of work in defining standards for HTML, CSS, and SVG. These standards have a lot of unbelievably cool features, with much more in the pipe. But nobody can use most of them, because they're not widely implemented. What's the point of working so hard to create good standards if nobody uses them?
We need a reference web engine that will drive standards-based web development, just as the reference implementation of Java, with all its flaws, drove the adoption of the Java platform. Microsoft probably wouldn't use it, but it would provide some small pressure for them to be more standards compliant. W3C could develop such a comonent from scratch, or they could use Gecko; but KHTML seems to have the code base that's closest to a real tipping point.
Sharing bookmarks on a LAN is both great and troublesome. How do you implement this easily and quickly in a Windows environment without Rendezvous?
That's easy. Port it.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
My three reasons for sticking with Safari are:
1) The Google Toolbar (although not implemented in the same full and correct way as the real thing on Windows).
2) Ad blocking
3) Pith Helmet - it allows ad content (or really any content) in a web page to be blocked. So banners and images can be stopped and not downloaded - saving my slow connection from having to bother with them, as well as not even seeing the ads.
I also like the bookmark bar, but I suppose many of the browsers have that now.
I know little to nothing about OmniWeb, will have to check it out more.
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I just don't know. Omni have been around for ages, and in the NeXT camp, but their browser has been around for ages too, and crashing for ages, and was totally eclipsed there for a while until they came up with the idea of using the same code as Safari to rejuvenate and refurbish their own product. And yes, that is the essence of the GPL, but what irks me is that prior to the introduction of Safari, Omni could not get a stable browser out the door.
There is no doubt in my mind that D Hyatt and Co could make this Omni browser if they wanted - but they ostensibly opt not to, and for reasons which are not that hard to fathom. A lot of people like - even prefer - Safari for its simplicity - and for its relative stability.
I prefer good coding. I don't care much what great new UI gizmos a company dreams up. I want dependability and stability, and without disparaging anyone unnecessarily, it seems that these two virtues have been difficult to achieve for the Omni Group, and I see no indication they're suddenly going to get any better.
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.
... I'm still looking forward to giving it a try.
It's a side effect of having a wide screen. Because my (PowerBook 15") screen is wider than it is tall, on average, each individual window takes up all the vertical space (or at least, enough so that I can't have another usable window in the same x coordinates). There is additional space above and below the window, but not enough for another usable window.
So, if I need to use two windows at once, I need to put them next to each other (or change their size, which is too time-consuming). If I keep my browser windows the same size as I normally do, OmniWeb windows will take up a lot more of my usable space, not just because they take up more space (they do) but because they take up the space I am actually using for something else, whereas adding a horizontal bar takes up more vertical space, which wasn't being used for anything anyway. Maybe I shrink the height of my browser windows a dozen or so pixels, but that is insignificant compared to having two windows side-by-side.
And while I am sure I can close the Tabs drawer, I don't want to. I like leaving my list of tabs open. Opening and closing it when going back and forth between windows would be annoying, too.
Me too!
Thank ghod someone is finally doing this -- I've been hoping for almost exactly this kind of drawer based, thumbnail enhanced tabs implementation for over a year now, and posted about the idea both at Slashdot and MacSlash last January. Others were writing about it, too. I also submitted it as a bug in Safari and as an enhancement on Apple's feedback page -- but then apparently they're deluged with such reports, never read them individually, and can't do more than statistical analysis of things people are reporting frequently, so I'm not optimistic that'll ever get noticed.
Anyway, it's nice to think that, even though this stuff hasn't made its way into Safari [yet? ever?], someone at Omni either read these posts or came up with the same idea independently. Either way is okay with me -- I'm just glad to see it's happening.
It seems obvious to me that this would be an excellent next evolution for browser interfaces. Wibbling over whether it's better to have tabs from the middle or the left (Chimera vs. Everyone else), what order new tabs should be inserted into the list, and whether to give tabs a fixed width (Safari) or let them collapse down to a certain minimum (Firebird) & how to handle spillover that doesn't fit in is all missing the point.
Whether or not people find it intuitive, a text column width of six inches or so is optimal for most people, which means that for the standard squat rectangular display most people have on their computers, a "well-shaped" browser window should have a lot of space on the left & right, while extending as close to the top & bottom of the screen as the user is comfortable with. In other words, vertical screen real estate will tend to be at a premium, and horizontal real estate will tend to be under-utilized.
Therefore, putting a row of tabs along the top, rather than the side, is a literal waste of space.
If the tabs are on the side, you get back another line or two of visible page text, and you have a lot more room to play with how the tabs are presented. As the Omniweb demo videos show, you now have room to put in thumbnail icons, which can give much better visual feedback than just a word or two of the title text. Another idea would be to put the favicon.ico graphic superimposed over part of that thumbnail, much the way that OSX puts the application icon at the corner of minimized page icons. You can put in fairly rich interface controls -- like for example a combined, hierarchical view of currently open tabbed documents, bookmarks, and a history listing, all accessible or hidable as you choose by disclosure/flippy triangles. And so on.
I'm glad this is finally happening. Time permitting -- so far, it hasn't -- I was half-ready to start writing this myself. Now that Omni has announced an implementation, I hope that tabs start evolving in this direction for every browser (except IE, which seems comfortably stuck in 1998 -- but then does anyone serious still use IE anymore?). In the meantime, this just might be worth finally buying a copy of Omniweb, and retiring Safari unless & until Apple comes out with a better version...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I really don't like the inflexibility of the drawer model. A drawer is nicely associated with it's window, but always takes up the screen space whether the window is 'key' or not. I much perfer the the 'panel' approach of NeXTStep. In NeXTStep, you'd have one or a few panels per application, they could hide (or not depending on implementation) when the application wasn't 'front'. The content of the panel would change to track the 'key' window. and the panel could be moved where ever you'd like on the workspace. Given a multi monitor setup, that flexibility can be very very useful.
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