Omniweb 5 Preview
Ooooooo. Omniweb has a neat little preview up about their new browser shipping in a bit, which looks kinda interesting. You can check it out here. In looking it over, these things come to mind:
- Using Webcore
Good! I'd been playing with the betas a bit, but just in a cursory fashion as they were mightily unstable. It's a little disconcerting that, from what I've been hearing, they're going to be a bit behind on the current versions. Webcore is still a little immature to not be staying on top of it- stuff is getting fixed all the time. I know there are some caching, speed, resource usage & rendering things coming down the pipe.
I'm also a bit sad to see another engine die- it was obvious omnigroup's engine couldn't keep up with the others, but diversity can be a good thing. Right now, due to the other browsers sucking royally, it seems to be down to webcore vs mozilla based browsers. - Tabbed Browsing
Also good! Up till now, the betas were practically Safari in drag. Differentiation is good. I'm a little concerned about the whole thumbnail in a drawer thing... this was discussed a lot back on theChimeraCamino list. The consensus, from a UI standpoint, was that while it was a nice idea it'd pretty much fall flat in general use. IE, 10 thumbnails of slashdot pages are all going to look the same (you see this with Apple's Expose, too), meaning you're still going to have the label, so lots of scrolling is going to ensue. Still, I'm interested in checking it out and seeing how it'll work in real use, maybe I'll be surprised. I have a hunch it will be nice, but people with lower-rez monitors are going to be pining for normal-style tabs across the window.
What is very cool is that you can drag and drop "tabs" to different windows, something no other mac browser does right now. Back in the early Chimera days I know they were looking at it, but it would have meant custom widgets as Apple's tab frameworks didn't support it, so they were trying to avoid it. - Workspaces
Slick. I know Opera has had this for awhile, and I've always liked it and wished it would make its way into other browsers. This could be a real time saver, and is one of the only thing Opera has over the competition on this side of the fence. They seem to have taken a step further, which could be very cool. - New Bookmarks
With the exception of some RSS feed capabilities (which I don't get- if you're in a web browser, why not just go look at them? But I could see why things like netnewswire would have them edgy as hell) it seems to be a straight Safari clone. I like the search field built into the interface, ala the address book, as Safari is pretty confusing the first time around. - Search Shortcuts / Page Marking
Egh. Search shortcuts has the potential to be really sweet, and save you a few clicks. Nothing big, but a nice refinement of what others have. Page marking just seems to be Apple's snapback with a little more ooomph, so it's hard to get excited about it until I use it. - Icons
Just an aside, but Omniweb's toolbar icons have always bugged the hell out of me and these don't look any better. The color schemes aren't consistent (detracting from the content), they use different degrees of drop shadows and even different angles for them. Egh.
Of course all of the above is null & void until the beta is released in February, but still, it's exciting, as Omniweb has a lot of potential and there are a lot of areas in which Safari is lacking.
What I'm really worried about is the idea of a lagging webcore- I can understand it from a development point of view, but there are lots and lots of areas that could use improvement, and enhancing webcore is another area they could differentiate themselves.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 01, 2004, at 10:50 PM
