The number 5 began to take on some magical significance, perhaps helped along by the years-long anticipation of the "G5".whatever that was. Whispers began to circulate about OmniWeb version 5 which was to have an all-new rendering engine. The layout engine in OmniWeb 4 was crippled by design choices that made sense nearly a decade earlier, but were now making progress difficult or impossible. OmniWeb had a loyal base of users, but rendering speed and standards support became serious issues after the Gecko invasion. A wave of Gecko-based browsers soon arrived on Mac OS X. As the platform matured, the web browser competition heated up. The fact that this impressive application was created by such a small team of programmers at Omni is a testament to the powerful application development tools and libraries supported by OS X.īut this was during Mac OS X's infancy, when it took a lot less to make a big splash in the then-small pool of native Mac OS X applications. OmniWeb is a veritable poster child for Mac OS X technologies and interface elements such as drawers, configurable toolbars, system-wide services for typography, spell checking, and so on. As I wrote almost three years ago in my Mac OS X 10.0 review: Version 4 was an impressive Mac OS X application. Previously unknown applications suddenly became award-winning examples for other Mac OS X developers to follow. The Omni Group moved wholesale to the Mac OS X platform after Apple purchased NeXT in 1996, porting and then substantially improving all of its products. Like The Omni Group itself, OmniWeb started its life on the NeXT platform, home of the world's first web browser. OmniWeb has a long and sporadically distinguished history. Enter The Omni Group and their near-mythical web browser, OmniWeb 5. This is rare, especially in an established application category like web browsers.Īs a lifetime Mac user and all-around technological sentimentalist, I tend to look to the underdog for software innovation. Like most web developers, I look upon every new addition to the web browser ecosystem with simultaneous hope and suspicion.Īs a user with a well documented obsession with usability and interface design, I am always looking for software that takes its interface one step beyond what has come before it. After a decade or so of web development experience, the web browser is both my ally and my enemy. As faithful readers can attest, I am not among them. Here is a tip for Omniweb: to switch between tabs press Apple(or command)-Up and Apple-Down.įirefox is still the browser of my choice, since stability is more important than any cool feature.Some people have trouble getting excited about web browsers. You need a powerful machine to enjoy flawless preview of many tabs all updating at the same time. When composing messages the functions are limited compared to Firefox and couldn’t edit the template at all. Can’t play movies in the browser window until they are loaded fully and they also do not appear in the thumbnails. □ It was crashing with one particular site all the time and crashed once with blogger too. I hate the name, it reminds me of an omnibus, which is old and slow. I’m happy to pay 30 bucks for an app that I use for hours every day, although there are too many free alternatives to this app with comparable features. ![]() All the sites that I visited appear correctly. Scrolling with the scroll wheel mouse is much better than either of the two mentioned. You can save a set of pages and return to them with a click. The workspaces function is potentially pretty cool too. ![]() The visual feedback of the little green tickmark on the thumbnail that tells you the page is fully loaded is great. Especially cool that you can just drag and drop the little web page thumbnails between windows. But, I feel this edition is a bit premature. I has features that are actually useful and cool. It can do all that Safari and Firefox and more. I’ve been testing for some time now and I’m still not jumping from joy. I’ve tried a beta, but it was not stable, however I loved the features. I’ve been waiting for the omniweb 5 to come out for a long time.
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