OmniWeb 5.0 in 2003

[soosy]

Yes very well organized but...

Originally posted by AmbitiousLemon
thank you eunuchs, very well organized.

Yes, yes very well organized, indeed, but I believe the original poster was referring to Omniweb not Mozilla.

🙂

but your points about Mozilla's compatibility still stand.

 

[eunuchs]

Re: Yes very well organized but...

Originally posted by soosy


Yes, yes very well organized, indeed, but I believe the original poster was referring to Omniweb not Mozilla.

D'OH! Never even considered that... That would do a great deal to explain the payment comment.

/me earns his newbie stripes. 😉

 

[BobVB]

Originally posted by eunuchs


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

Who's the troll? This is a thread about Omniweb, not Monzilla. I haven't tried that since the last time I did it was totally unusable.

Its good to hear that it does support CSS and iTools, but the browser under discussion does not.

Try and use a mental 'style sheet' next time and keep your answers framed in the context of what the thread is about, Omniweb.

It is incomplete, it doesn't support CSS or iTools.

 

[BobVB]

Well, I downloaded Mozilla 1.0 and tried it - it does support CSS in all the tags I have on my website and seems to deal with the massive table of my family genealogy index in a third the time.

So I guess that settles it - Omniweb will probably never get my money 🙂

 

[agent302]

Originally posted by BobVB

It is incomplete, it doesn't support CSS or iTools.

Actually, Omniweb supports iTools just fine, it's just that iTools claims that Omniweb doesn't. If you just change the compatibility preferences to make Omniweb tell web pages that it's really IE, then iTools works wonderfully. Here's a screenshot of Webmail under Omniweb:

 

[Rower_CPU]

Sorry, but a browser masquerading as another one doesn't do it for me.

If a browser is truly compatible and people haven't designed web pages with specific browsers in mind we wouldn't ever need this "feature".🙄

 

[BobVB]

Originally posted by agent302


Actually, Omniweb supports iTools just fine, it's just that iTools claims that Omniweb doesn't. If you just change the compatibility preferences to make Omniweb tell web pages that it's really IE, then iTools works wonderfully. Here's a screenshot of Webmail under Omniweb:

been there, done that. Though the more pedestrian functions work, try going to the HomePage section - you will get selection rectangles that have no content where they should be listing web sites, pages, and files. That's why they restrict it from access - it won't work with all the features of iTools.

 

[agent302]

Yeah, I checked that out, you're right. However, I encourage you to not write off OmniWeb completely. It has a lot of cool features that other browsers don't (like the ability to block banner ads, a built in color-coded HTML editor, the ability to use Apple Spell Services (so that my typos in this post are underlined when I type them) and full use of sheets, drawers, and other cool Aqua widgets). Frankly, Mozilla's interface is a deal breaker for me for extended use (and yes, I have the Navzilla skin installed and I'm using Silk to provide Quartz text rendering) because it's just too slow. It shouldn't take 2 or 3 seconds for a new window to open when I type Cmd-N (and yeah, I could open a tab, but I've become really good at managing browser windows).

So, my basic assessment is, yeah, OW is lacking right now, but given what the OmniGroup is promising for OW 5, I have great faith in it becoming the browser to beat all browsers. The OmniGroup are very competent developers (see: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, the many games they've helped port, and all their other apps), and are a great asset for Apple's cause.

 

[BobVB]

Originally posted by agent302
Yeah, I checked that out, you're right. However, I encourage you to not write off OmniWeb completely.

Well if its any consulation Mozilla 1.0 can't display the iTools Home Page either. As to giving up on Omniweb, just think of me as a modern day Diogenes searching the darkness for an complete IE replacement. As I stated in the beginning I can't find one. There is no Mac browser with full javascript and CSS support other than IE at the moment.

I'd love Omniweb to be fully functional (thought I'm not clear on the advantage of the 'drawers' they are more annoying to me.) Heck, I'd love for any 'other-than-IE' browerser to be fully functional!

But the search and the wait goes on.

 

[j763]

damn apple

apple's pissing me off by forcing iTools users to use IE... And mozilla is a complete replacement for IE.

 

[eunuchs]

Re: damn apple

Originally posted by j763
apple's pissing me off by forcing iTools users to use IE... And mozilla is a complete replacement for IE.

Send them an email and tell them you want to use Mozilla. It really shouldn't be that difficult to fix the site. And I would be really surprised if Apple - given their recent subtle endorsment of Chimera - didn't want their own site to work with Mozilla too.

 

[j763]

k, fired off an email...

 

[BobVB]

of course its more complicated than that - since IE is the default browser shipped with the Mac they can't change the iTools site code to something incompatible with IE regardless if the page isn't currently what Mozilla considere's 'pure' code or not.

But it would be great if iTools did support Mozilla - I'll write a note today (if I can figure out just where such a message should go 😉

 

[eunuchs]

Apple's "Ideas and Comments" form for iTools:

http://itools.mac.com/WebObjects/Tools.woa/wa/iToolsComments?aff=consumer&cty=US&lang=en

BobVB, they could easily support both browsers. It's done all the time, either through server-side browser detection, or client-side scripts. How do you think they deny OmniWeb? 😉

 

[BobVB]

thanks for the link - message sent. Maybe we should start a 'request campaign' to help nudge Apple off its addiction to the 'dark side'?

 

[senjaz]

Hurrah, someone else who understands what they're talking about.

IE's CSS implementation sucks. The biggest pain in the ass is how they interpret the 'width' property of a block element. According to W3.org the width is the inner width of an element excluding the widths of margins, borders and padding. OmniWeb and Mozilla both support this correctly. IE's width is the width of the entire element borders, padding, and all. This means your layouts will not display the same in IE and destroys the advantage of using CSS for precise positioning of elements.

Consider dropping down to using tables for layout? IE can totally ignore your width parameters in TD tags too, because it thinks it knows better than the author of the page <sarcasm>who obviously doesn't know what they are doing or know what they want their page to look like</sarcasm>

I've all but given up trying to write cross browser code that appears the same in all browsers. Now I write to HTML 4 or XHTML 1 standards and ensure it's basically viewable in IE. If there are display errors then to hell with them.

IE Mac doesn't even render pages as nicely as IE Win. Which is a big kick in the teeth, MS could atleast make their half assed attempt at browser software consistent across platforms.

Originally posted by eunuchs


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.