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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."
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:
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.
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'?
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
heh, ServiceHolder ( http://www.serviceholder.com ) did it first. Funny.
omniwebtabs.mp4
workspaces.mov
Your credit card information wants to be free.
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.
Sigh. Thumbnails are optional. You can just show the window titles in a vertical list. Watch the movie.
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
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.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Actually one of the developers has been saying that he bas been working a lot on the program on his 12" iBook, and has been saying that both the tabs and the workspaces help him better manage his screen real-estate. Of course that means he was also using XCode on a 12" iBook, and you have to be a contortionist to do that well....
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.
I don't like the way they just let content run off the bottom of the page. They've always done that, and I don't like it. They should, IMHO, put a discreet narrow white space at the bottom. I don't know. I know it just doesn't look right for me the way it is - it feels 'half baked'.
Their location bar, with all the other doodads they've already got up there, is about wide enough for 'apple.com' but no more. I suspect this is going to be a real pain for users of the new version.
And I've had no joy with ever getting OW to run for more than a few minutes without crashing all over the place - and not when rendering web pages, but when trying the possible in configuration settings and the like.
And all the Omni PR people have had to say about that is: 'a lot of our users don't experience crashes'. So wow - that's how you deal with crashes at Omni Group support?
No thanks. I got Safari if I want, and Safari is an honest effort, and Safari is not playing leap frog or riding on the tails of anyone else's efforts. Omni should first attempt to get their own browser out the door without crashing all over the place; when they've demonstrated they too can write solid code, then they can do what they want.
Creating a souped-up version of Safari might give them back a market niche, but it's not honest the way they're going at it, IMHO. Show you can write a browser first - then worry about the doodads. I for one will not go near OW5 until I hear the word that Omni have suddenly learned how to produce good, stable code.
What gives? I submitted this story three days ago!
Anyhow, congrats to the guys at Omni for another major advance in Browser design. Someday, I'd like to see a list of all the things Omni invented that got copied by Netscape, and then by MS, and are now considered standard browser features.
I applaud Omni for their heroic efforts over the years to deal with emulating Netscape and IE bugs that lame web designers didn't even know were bugs, and for getting more done by fewer people than any other development team I can think of.
Those of you who aren't familiar with Omni's other apps, check them out. These guys are some of the best software developers in the business.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
MS had dropped development of IE for Mac OS X since June of 2003.
8 ,0 0.asp
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,11115
-B
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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