OMNIWEB REVIEW DOWNLOAD

My three niggling gripes about OmniWeb’s tab drawer: These features are all sorely missing from Safari. If you try to close a window that contains more than one tab, OmniWeb asks if that’s really what you want to do (but if you don’t like the warning, you can turn it off). You can explode tabs into separate individual windows. Most importantly, you can drag tabs from one window to another you can even shift-click to select multiple tabs in one window and drag them all to another window at once. Yes, it uses more screen space, but it uses horizontal space, which works well with Apple’s move toward widescreen displays, and strikes me as loosely analogous to the context-switching sidebars in other apps - like iTunes, iPhoto, the Finder, and three-pane readers like email clients and NetNewsWire.īut even if you don’t like where OmniWeb displays its tabs, you’ve got to love what it allows you to do with them. I’m quite happy with OmniWeb’s tab drawer. But OmniWeb still includes the page titles, so you’re no worse off than you would be in Safari. The only case where OmniWeb’s thumbnails aren’t all that useful is when you have several tabs open to pages on the same site, in which case the scaled thumbnails are indistinguishable.

And the more tabs you add to a Safari window, the more truncated the titles get. In Safari (and in OmniWeb’s list view for tabs), tabs are only identifiable by their names. The scaled-down thumbnails of the pages in the tabs are easily identifiable, with just a glance. The advantage to OmniWeb’s presentation is when you use the thumbnail view: I agree that screen space is precious (I spend my days in front of a 12” iBook), but I’m willing to give this extra space to OmniWeb. In terms of screen area, Safari comes out way ahead.īut in every other regard than screen area, OmniWeb’s presentation is superior. Safari’s tabs are displayed in a wide but short strip, across the top of the browser window. The argument against OmniWeb’s tab implementation is that it uses up a lot more screen space than does Safari’s (and Mozilla-based browsers). I’m listing it first in this review, however, because I anticipate it being the most controversial feature - it’s the most visually distinct new feature, and when the peanut gallery gripes about “the interface”, they tend to focus on what an app looks like. I like tabbed-browsing in general, and I like the Omni Group’s implementation, but it’s not even close to being the best or most important new feature in OmniWeb 5. Tabs can also be shown in a list view, sans thumbnails, to fit more tabs in the drawer without needing to scroll. The thumbnails are scaled representations of the page displayed in the tab. In fact, visually, they’re not really tabs at all, but rather thumbnails in a drawer on the side of the window. The idea of which is much the same as it is in Safari and Mozilla-based browsers, but the visual presentation is quite different.

OMNIWEB REVIEW DOWNLOAD

Keep in mind, if you download the public beta, that it is very much beta software, replete with crashers and other show-stopping bugs. Here’s an overview of the big new features. OmniWeb 5 is the first release where Omni has been able to focus almost solely on the browser application, rather than the rendering engine. OmniWeb 4.5 was a stop-gap, the first release of the browser that used WebCore instead of the Omni Group’s home-grown (and terribly outdated) rendering engine.

OmniWeb 5 is important because it offers an abundance of major new features, including two that are revolutionary. With a rendering engine based on WebCore and JavaScriptCore - the same underlying technologies Safari is built around - OmniWeb 5 renders pages beautifully, and, more importantly, offers robust support for web standards.īut the current version of OmniWeb - version 4.5 - also uses WebCore, and it’s an also-ran browser.

Based on today’s beta, and the two alpha releases I’ve used for the last week, OmniWeb 5 has the potential to be a very big deal. Today the Omni Group released the first public beta of OmniWeb 5.0. OmniWeb 5 Public Beta Monday, 2 February 2004

Omniweb review