OmniWeb 5.0 in 2003

Re-write!

Sounds like this will likely address a number of issues that have been plaguing OW.

It's great that they are committing their resources to an undertaking this big. If they do this as well as they have done OmniGraffle (and others), we will end up with a browser better than IE for Windows (or at least as good).

Hopefully it will have tabs...

Chris

they "will be"?

we're going to write...

I hope they've started rewriting stuff by now.. it'd be a dreadful 6-9 months if they still have to start all that stuff.

Now that we have nice anti-aliased fonts in Carbon apps, with Silk, what does OmniWeb have over, say, Mozilla? I used to use OmniWeb, but its rendering was too buggy and it was very choppy at scrolling pages. I hope they can correct these faults, but even if they do, I don't see why I would want to use it instead of something else...

Re: they "will be"?

Originally posted by jg3
we're going to write...

I hope they've started rewriting stuff by now.. it'd be a dreadful 6-9 months if they still have to start all that stuff.

Click to expand...

hmmm, let's see... 6-9 months from now would be early 2003.

Apparently...

...Omniweb has a lot of good stuff hooked to a really crappy renderer (according to some people from omnigroup). According to one of the guys on the Chimera development team, a good fully native browser (non-gecko, gecko isn't really native, it does everything itself) should be able to squish Chimera/Mozilla speedwise. If they make it standards compliant as well then gecko based browsers (which, right now, are the only non-omni browsers worth using) will have no advantages.

Originally posted by alex_ant
Now that we have nice anti-aliased fonts in Carbon apps, with Silk, what does OmniWeb have over, say, Mozilla? I used to use OmniWeb, but its rendering was too buggy and it was very choppy at scrolling pages. I hope they can correct these faults, but even if they do, I don't see why I would want to use it instead of something else...

Click to expand...

Scrolling in OW under 10.1.5 is much better.

I am giving Mozilla 1.0 the first ever serious 'might swap to it from OW if I like it enough' test I've done since using OW with OS X when it came out.

I am an avid OW supporter, but I have to say, i'm seriously considering sticking with Mozilla...

Anyone know how you make every window you open come up as a tab?

Did anyone else notice the weird anti-Cocoa slant of that article?

In other news, wasn't OW/5 originally supposed to be out by now? I guess we can look forward to middling 4.x betas for the rest of '02?

Originally posted by syntax
Did anyone else notice the weird anti-Cocoa slant of that article?

Click to expand...

yes. it was very distasteful and out of place. omniweb is as great as it is because of cocoa. seemed odd for the writers to be attacking it.


its really great to see the omnigroup doing this. they really seem to be listening to the public. the sped things up. and when that wasnt good enough for us, they decided to rewrite everything. these guys are amazing. i cant wait to see what they have in store for us. considering ow was written before 10.0 came out im sure there is a lot of old code in there that could benefit from a rewrite with jaguar in mind. this could become something really amazing. and all this time i thought chimera was going to be THE browser. looks like ow is getting ready to blow chimera away.

i REALLY hope we see tabs, but i sort of doubt it. man if ow had tabs id switch right now.

Actually, in the article, a couple of our concerns are answered:

First, its a balanced view of Cocoa, its weaknesses and strengths, particularly as regards tables:

"It turns out that Cocoa views were never written to support several hundred of them on a window in a scroll view, so there's all kinds of slowness that happens when you do that. It's something we get dinged for all the time, and by just writing our own, very lightweight and much less general-purpose classes, we'll be able to get around it," said Shipley.

Later there are positive comments about Cocoa.

Also re: TABS...they are going to add them, though they may change the appearance somewhat. (see article)

OW has gotten better with each beta. I have to say I like it best overall, but maybe that is because I paid for a seat!

Down on Cocoa?

I didn't read it that way. There is the quote from Shipley (OmniGroup president) about them using views in a way that was never intended, and how that costs them in speed. However, he then stated, "I feel confident in saying that Cocoa can't be killed now because too many people have been infected with how good it is." The most the reporter wrote was that Cocoa had "an ever-decreasing advantage over Carbon..." That's pretty indisputable.

And as for tabs, he said,

"We'll probably do something akin to tabbed browsing -- that was a good idea, I think from the Linux world, originally. We'll do it our way, though; I don't think they've necessarily got the best UI yet, but there's something good in the fundamental idea."

Click to expand...

Sounds good. I just don't like the "probably". Sounds pretty definite, though.

Chris

What are tabs? I am a bit confused...

You know on the Apple site how there is a series of tabs across the top? In Chimera each site you go to opens a new tab across the top, just like Apple's arrangement. First tab might say MSNBC, next tab might say MacRumors, third tab might say... To go back to that site, you just click on the tab and it's instantly there. Without a doubt it is the best feature in browsing to come along in a couple of years.

WHAT ARE TABS?!?!?!

Tabs are a different way of having multiple pages open at once, each one with a tab at the top. For many of the converted, it is the only way to surf. Currently, only Mozilla derivatives (Mozilla, Chimera, and Netscape) sport tabs. Try it for three days and just see if you can go back

Here is a screenshot. It is Mozilla with Navzilla skin and Silk.

Chris

chmorley

Yesterday I tried to download Mozilla 1.0 and the installation went fine, but when I try to open the program for the first time it seems to freeze up. So I deleted and re-downloaded. Exact same problem! Ideas?

**How do you capture and how do you post your screenshots??

Beej:

If you go into Mozilla Preferences, under the Navigator->Tabbed Browsing option, there are a few options you can set to your liking. You can set Cmd-Click to open a link in a new tab, you can also set Ctrl-Enter to open a typed URL in a new tab as well. Some other nifty features, such as background loading.

With background loading, I go through a page, clicking links merrily without once being interrupted from actually reading... Once I finish an article, I flip to the next tab and so on. It makes for an awesome browsing experience.

chmorley:

Where did you find the Navzilla skin? I've tried all the theme pages listed on mozilla.org, but there hasn't been anything new on there for about 8 months. There's only a few (pretty ho-hum) skins to choose from.

I guess my priorities are different, but I'd rather have a browser that fully supports all CSS tags and had sufficient javascript to at least access my bloody iTools account first! As it stands now the only browser I've found that currently does both is IE.

Tabs are 'cute' but I'd rather have a fully functional browser first - I know they won't be getting any of my money until it is.

Navzilla?

chmorley,

Where did you find the Navzilla theme? It's basically Chimera Navigator's face, right? I'm sure many of us would like to slap that on Mozilla. thanks!

http://140.107.24.64/mozilla/navzilla/

http://www.kmgerich.com/pinstripe/pinstripe.html

http://140.107.24.64/mozilla/

Navzilla

Thanks, AmbitiousLemon... However, when I try to install and use the theme, Mozilla keeps bombing out. I'm using the final release version. Maybe I should try installing it, but not using it.

Update: Yep -- that did the trick. I installed it, quit (just being over-cautious), restarted, changed themes, restarted, and it works fine.

did you use the installer from that first link?

you are using mozilla 1.0?

if the answer to both is yes, id suggest emailing the author. the only problems ive had is when the installer is for an older version of mozilla than i am using.

Originally posted by BobVB
I guess my priorities are different, but I'd rather have a browser that fully supports all CSS tags and had sufficient javascript to at least access my bloody iTools account first! As it stands now the only browser I've found that currently does both is IE.

Tabs are 'cute' but I'd rather have a fully functional browser first - I know they won't be getting any of my money until it is.

Click to expand...

Wow, this is simply a tremendous troll. But for the benefit of others who may be looking for an honest opinion, let's debunk:

• Mozilla fully supports CSS1 and most of CSS2 (by fully, I mean it supports the W3C standard, not some half-assed implementation which forces developers to target their designs for certain browsers on certain platforms)
• iDisk mounts fine. Webmail is fine. I don't know who uses iCards on a regular basis, but it appears to work fine. The only exception is Homepage. For all we know, this is because of poor coding on the part of Apple's web people, not Mozilla.
• Mozilla is free - they don't want your money

99% of the time, if you encounter a problem browsing the web with Mozilla, it is because some developer only tested against IE. It's pretty hard to justify purposely breaking your standards-compliant browser to mangle pages just like your competitor. Much less do so without knowing the method behind the madness.

As for "fully functional"... I would hardly consider IE for Mac "fully functional". More like "mostly acceptable". It does an awful job of rendering tables and is slow as molasses. Truth is, I find more sites render correctly under Mozilla on the Mac, even when they recommend IE.

thank you eunuchs, very well organized.

odd how everytime there is a discussion of a non-MS browser troll sneak in.

the best advice i could give is to try something before attacking it. i would guess most of you use macs because you didnt listen to the crowd and went and tried to find what was best. try doing the same with your browser and i think you will be pleasantly surprised. its a little like not knowing what you are missing until you try something better. keep the mind open and dont be afraid to try something that will make things easier for you.

peace yo

Here's a good resource for CSS compatibility:
http://www.macedition.com/cb/resources/

I'd be interested to see some updates with Mozilla 1.0...

Re: chmorley

Originally posted by sjs
Yesterday I tried to download Mozilla 1.0 and the installation went fine, but when I try to open the program for the first time it seems to freeze up. So I deleted and re-downloaded. Exact same problem! Ideas?

**How do you capture and how do you post your screenshots??

Click to expand...

A couple of ideas. If it freezes at the splash screen with the "Registering JS component nsHelperAppDlg.js" displayed, then it might be your skin. This happened to me going from RC 1 to RC 2. I had to start it in RC 1, revert to the "Modern" theme, then start RC 2. After this, switching to Pinstripe (which I was using at the time) was no problem. If this isn't when it happens, I just don't know. I have seen other people recommend removing the Mozilla prefs, but I haven't had to do this. Also, if you do, it will remove all of your bookmarks, cookies, etc., so I would avoid it. I'd bet there's a copy of these things somewhere, but it's probably a pain in the ass.

I take screenshots by hitting Command-Shift-3. I then convert them to JPG and reduce them in Photoshop so they are less than 120 K (the limit here). Attaching them is straightforward--click the "Browse" button (next to "Attach File") and navigate to the screenshot.

And BobVB, you obviously haven't tried Mozilla. You sound really stupid. Tabs are "cute" the way that pull down menus are cute. Go away.

Chris