OmniWeb 5 Is Looking Very Nice
- May 17, 2004
- 4 comments
I’ve been playing around with different browsers lately. I stopped using Safari a while ago because it seemed to really bog down when I was opening up more than two or three tabs at the same time. Contextual menus would take F O R E V E R to come up during this time.
I then tried out Mozilla for a little while. It’s got a great rendering engine with Gecko, but it’s just too bulky and doesn’t have a true OS X interface.
I then tried out the promising Firefox. It was faster than Mozilla, not to mention a whole lot smaller. It didn’t bog down when opening more than a couple tabs. It did have a problem with the Google AdSense login though. For some unknown reason, whenever I tried to login, it would just throw me back to the AdSense homepage instead of to the reports page like it’s supposed to. And just like Mozilla, it didn’t have a real OS X interface.
Next I tried out the new Opera browser. It’s rendering was excellent and it was definitely fast. It had some nice features , but the interface was so nasty, I couldn’t use it for more than 10 minutes. Plus, the ads in the corner were just annoying.
Lately, I’ve been playing with the latest beta of OmniWeb, and I have to admit, this is one kick-ass browser. I had tried some of the earlier betas, but they were buggy and unstable (imagine that!), so I never used them for more than a couple minutes. The latest beta (6.1 as of now) is a lot more stable, so it’s given me some time to kick the tires and see what’s under the hood.
It took me a little while to get used to how OmniWeb (from now on OW) handles tabbed browsing. It’s different than the other tabbed browsers out there in that it shows thumbnails of each site in a side drawer. You also have the option of displaying them as a list instead, in case you have a lot of tabs open.
Workgroups are nice. This allows you to group Web sites for quicker loading and viewing. Every day, I check several Mac news sites. With OW, I open the sites in tabs, and make them a workgroup. The next time I want to view the sites, I switch to that workgroup. OW can be monitoring those sites for changes, even while I’m not viewing them, and can alert me when content has been changed.
I use ExpressionEngine to maintain my site. The combination of OW with EE is really nice. The little pop-up windows that ask for URLs and other information for tags in entries are nice and clean. Each textarea in a form has a little plus icon in the upper corner. When clicked, it opens up a window with a larger textarea for you to write in. That comes in very handy while typing long entries and you want to see what all you’ve written easily. I’m using it to write this entry right now.
There are other great features with OW like RSS feed-reading, excellent preferences management, a true OS X interface and the same speedy rendering of Safari. All of this makes OW the best browser for OS X, in my opinion.
Nice plug of Omniweb. Safari and I have been getting along nicely, even with three or four windows each with five or more tabs. However, it never hurts to explore other software possibilities.