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

[bnenning]

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.

Obligatory Opera comment

[cgenman]

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.

Re:block partial conent?

[larkost]

1) OmniWeb has had this for a long time... it just doesn't proclaim itself (and is a lot more configurable). Just type "google this and that" and it will return the results page of a google search for "this and that". You can make your own queries for any site you would like. In 4.5 this can only be a get query, but in 5 it can be a POST one as well. From the screenshots 5 will also have the option of having a separate field for this.

2) OmniWeb has had this since version 3. By size, not from same domain, or by a regular expression. I am not sure if Omni or iCab was the first to have it, but it was one of those two.

3) see 2...

Bookmark management has been one of OmniWeb's strengths, and it looks like they are running that ball again in 5. Having bookmarks check themselves at user definable intervals is really nice.

Cookie management is also a strong point, and the per-site preference mechanism will make this easier to use.

Take a look at OmniWeb. You can use it for free without restriction. It just asks you to register it on startup, and if you leave a window untouched for long enough it gets an "unregistered" banner cross it until you touch it again. And if you are really interested, check out the OmniWeb-l list, the developers are really responsive.

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:Stingy Location Bar

[hysterion]

it's not honest the way they're going at it, IMHO.

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.

You're so right. How dare they build on open code, implementing open standards?!? These guys are hijacking the web, pure and simple!!!

Omni should first attempt to design their own markup language and transfer protocol. Once they've demonstrated they too can write a good network stack and lay their own backbone fiber, then they can do what they want.

Anything short (including their sickening use of public roads to drive to work!!!) is just sheer piracy on their part.