OmniGroup announced that OmniWeb 5 will be available as a public beta in February. I was using OmniWeb before Safari came out and loved its feature set. But it was often slower than Safari and didn't have tabbed browsing, a feature I have found to be indispensable now for my use.
The new version looks like it is vastly improved with some new and powerful features. I think the new tabs implementation in the drawer is very interesting and promising. I like the idea of saved workspaces too. And customizing individual sites. And having RSS feeds right in the browser. If this is half as good as it sounds, I may have to pony up the dollars.
quote:I'm a big fan of tabbed browsing, but I just don't see how drawers will facilitate this. That drawer takes up a whole lot of space.
True, but it also gives you the option to see miniaturized versions of the sites, which can be very informative when you have lots of pages open, like I often do. I am not a fan of the drawer, per se, but it can be put to good use. I'll have to wait and test drive the beta before I decide on its utility. It does look promising by the little preview.
True, but it also gives you the option to see miniaturized versions of the sites, which can be very informative when you have lots of pages open, like I often do.
Well, I just don't think it's necessary to iconize everything. Granted, you might have more than one page open in a particular site, so the page title itself might not be informative enough, particularly in truncated (which is a great reason for space-economical fonts that are easy to read). But 99% of the time a simple text title will do. MyIE2 for XP even gives little yellow mouse-over labels that show the entire page name.
Still, I'm glad to see some competition on the Mac side of things. Tabbed browsing aside, the way a browser handles fonts is vitally important to me. Can I easily (as Safari does) make everything bigger? Unfortunately Safari does not allow a minimum font size threshold (the settings they have now and the third-party apps don't fix this). Actually, Safari's font sizing is still one the best, if not the best, that I've ever seen – Mac or PC. With most browsers (Netscape was famous for this) you click on "bigger" and you don't actually get bigger (or smaller, whatever). And please don't tell me about the technicalities of overriding style sheets. I want what I want and, in this case, Safari is one of the few browsers that delivers. I hope OmniWeb kicks ass in this regard.
Posts: 17093 | Location: The Left Coast | Registered: Sun May 04 2003
It is the only browser I have used for a longtime. It is simple and straight forward. Tabbed browsing included. I have always used the Go menu so Browsers without this function just do not appeal to me.
I hope they do not give up the development of Camino.
I've never heard of Camino. I might have to check that out. It looks like it might also have some kind of "saved workspaces". If I understand that term correctly, it means you can quit the browser and come back to all the various tabs you had opened when relaunching.
MyIE2 seems to have a "group" feature that is similar to Camino. You can create a group bookmark that represents all your opened tabs. I haven't used that feature yet, but it sounds very good in theory.
Posts: 17093 | Location: The Left Coast | Registered: Sun May 04 2003
I am not sure what "saved workspace" might be it is not in the version I am running. It does seem like a nice feature if it exsist. Camino has pop up blocking that works really well. It also has a way to set up pages in the toolbar bookmarks that will open one window with several tabs with different sites. It is a tabbed bookmark which seems to be something similar to what "saved workspaces" sound like but not exactly the same.
Camino was Chimera which had the name Navigator. It is part of the Mozilla group. For legal reasons they had to change the name to Camino. Camino has been really stable for me. Flash stuff used to make it crash but that seems to have been cured. It has not crashed in a long time for me. It seems to resize text pretty well also.
