Inspirational Technology

OmniWeb 4.5 Final

OmniGroup has released the final release of OmniWeb 4.5. This is the first release of OmniWeb that uses the Safari rendering engine and it seems quite nice.

OmniWeb was the first browser I used regularly after getting annoyed with IE. It always rendered beautifully, but suffered from poor performance and weak standards support. With the new release both of those problems have been solved and it still renders beautifully. It's really interesting to compare how it looks to Safari. Even though they use the same engine, Omniweb still comes out looking better. For one thing, they use different default fonts and colors and I like OmniGroup's choices. It's actually really surprising how much of a difference there is.

It's great to see this release. A lot of people thought Safari would mean the death of Omniweb, but Omnigroup is smart and now we can get two different interpretations on the same basic rendering engine. I don't know how much I'll use Omniweb, but this release puts them back on the playing field and it's fun to check it out. Here's what I see so far that I really like.

• HTML source view with syntax checking and highlighting. This has been in Omniweb for a while, but it's a nice feature and much better then the very basic source view in Safari.

• Better looking fonts.

• Spell checking turned on by default. Safari supports spell checking but you have to turn it on for each text field, which is really pretty silly.

• Searchable history so that you can search sites you've visited yet can't quite remember where you saw something. Seems like a feature that could be quite useful. May have been in old Omniwebs, but I wasn't aware of it at the time if it was.

• Auto checking of bookmarks to tell you when they've been modified. This is a feature that I was actually thinking of firing up Omniweb to try out again. It might be enough to get me to use it more as I'm working on a project where I want to monitor a large number of sites for changes.

• Omniweb isn't overly aggressive when caching files like Safari. I had such a problem with this when editing my MovableType templates that I had to start using Mozilla to do all the edits.

• And the number one killer feature that no other browser has, zoomable text fields. This is an awesome feature that gets you out of the stupid fixed size text areas that are so annoying on web sites. When you use a text area Omniweb adds a little button above the scroll bar that zooms it out into a new window that is fully resizable. Outstanding! I'm going to play with this more, but this feature alone may be enough to get me to use Omniweb as my main browser. Like Safari's aggressive caching this has been a major problem in editing the MovableType templates as the text area is always too small.

Hmm, OK, I'm liking this thing more and more. I'm going to give it another day or two and then I'll probably spring for a license. The only thing missing is tabs, we'll see if I can live without them. I'd definitely say Omniweb is back and I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes in the future now that they can focus on value add rather then just rendering problems.