I'm Testing Out Omni-Web!

[karsen]

PROS
- Fast!
- Individual page preference options are great
- I like the Save Window Size feature

CONS
- Tabs will take getting used to
- Is there live spell checking like Camino?
- It costs $15

If you're an OmniWeb owner please tell me why it's worth $15 to you.

[imagenious]

I bought OmniWeb a few months ago when they were running a special; I think it was either 10 or 15, whatever, I paid because I liked it and also like the company.

I read all their "about" info and whatever they have on their site about their company and founders and employees - I just thought that Omni was a company worth supporting. They are a good Mac software company and have good philosophies concerning Mac and software.

If I'm not mistaken, OmniWeb was the first native Mac browser available way back early in the initial stages of OS X. It was more expensive then and continued to be for a long time but they finally reduced the price to a reasonable level now, so I say go for it.

I agree with your "pros" - cons, well, a lot of complainers re the tabs, but they are just fine in my opinion and can be reduced in size to just text, so, although different, they are ok.

Spell chekking - nevar needud it.

[Zoidberg]

Spelling: Edit --> Spelling --> (set as you like)

Tabs: Seems to be a love or hate with everyone. I switched to text-only on the tabs and I like it.

Not Free: The thing is that you can use it for free, but you'll get a nag occasionally.

As for paying for the browser; I didn't mind ponying up the money (I bought it when it was more expensive years ago) as the company is very responsive to feature requests and solution provision. There's still some bugs I want to see worked out by v6 but upgrades are perpetually free, as I understand it.

The big feature I love is site preferences. E.g., I cannot read white on black text; I get retina burn pretty quickly. Using site prefs, I can tell OmniWeb not to load the background image or to override page styles, and I get normal black-text-on-white-background. For me, that's worth the price of admission right there.

You also have save window size, which you've seen, and the ability to save your workspace -- if you have 15 sites open and quit, those same 15 will come up when you relaunch. I know other browsers do this now, but OmniWeb has had it for ages.

And ditto to what imagenious said; they're a good company and good people with a great line of products (I use OmniGraffle daily for org charts). Plus, as he said, they were one of the first native browsers, having been a part of NEXTSTEP in the years before.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omni_Group for a good overview.

More on OmniWeb: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OmniWeb

[M A V I C]

[quote karsen]CONS
- Tabs will take getting used to I really like graphical, side-tabs. For example, the window I have open now has 25 tabs. Sure I've got a 24" LCD spanned next to a 22" CRT, but I don't browse that wide and that's basically what I'd need to be able to distinguish that many text, top-tabs in Safari, Firefox... They're much easier to recognize - they're graphical after all. If a text interface was so much better than grahipcal, we'd all be using the command line in OS X.

- Is there live spell checking like Camino?

As mentioned, yes. As with other cocoa apps, you can hover over a word and hit command+control+d and get a dictionary pop-up too.

- It costs $15
If you're an OmniWeb owner please tell me why it's worth $15 to you.

I paid $30 for mine. There was a price drop a few months back. Anyway, the features far surpass any other browser. Site Prefs alone probably save me $30 a day in time. I can always make more money, but I cannot make more time. Workspaces, saved states... also save me time. With a touch of a button I can bring up all the pages that relate to a client's site (admin login, server info, their site, logs, stats...)

Sure there's Add-ons for FF which do similar things. For example, AdBlock. But the adblocking in OW is much better, IMHO. It's much easier to configure and much more bullet proof.

Plus you get a company that adheres closely to the Apple HIG. It's a very Mac-like browser, as opposed to Firefox.

[karsen]

For the record I don't use FireFox. I find it ugly and slow. I use Safari and Camino. The latest G5 optimized build of Camino is incredibly fast.

I do like the tabs in OmniWeb, I just need to get used to their placement. It's a much more efficient use of horizontal space.

Thanks for the tip on the spell checker, that's big for me.

I've set OmniWeb as my default browser and will try it out a few days for normal browsing to see how it handles my every day tasks. So far though, I like what I see.

[davemchine]

I use Omniweb for about 95% of my browsing due to it's great features. But be aware that is uses the exact same engine that safari uses so if a web page doesn't work with safari then it won't work with omniweb either. So you will still need firefox for those few websites.

Dave

[M A V I C]

[quote davemchine]I use Omniweb for about 95% of my browsing due to it's great features. But be aware that is uses the exact same engine that safari uses so if a web page doesn't work with safari then it won't work with omniweb either. So you will still need firefox for those few websites.

Dave
Actually, it uses a newer version of the engine Safari does. So many things that don't work in Safari do work in Omniweb. There are still things one might need FF for though (and there are some things that work better in OW than FF.)

[Sam3]

So OmniWeb uses KHTML as it's rendering engine? Wasn't that changed? Didn't it use someting else in the early days?

I may have to give OmniWeb a try.

[davemchine]

MAVIC, how did you determine that Omniweb uses a newer version of the same engine safari does?

Dave

[M A V I C]

[quote Sam3]So OmniWeb uses KHTML as it's rendering engine? Wasn't that changed? Didn't it use someting else in the early days?

I may have to give OmniWeb a try.
Yeah, they used their own up until v.5. Now they use WebKit.

[quote davemchine]MAVIC, how did you determine that Omniweb uses a newer version of the same engine safari does?
They've said it on their forum, possibly on their blog and I think it's in the release notes.