Wow... Omniweb really does suck.

[spaceballl]

Back in the day, I used to use Omniweb everyday for browsing. But after the gecko browsers and Safari came out, I never really went back to Omniweb. I decided to give it a go today. Heh. This thing is just as slow as it used to be. The interface isn't half as intuitive as Camino, Firefox, or Safari's. It renders the pages half as well. It's twice as slow. It sucks for a free browser, let alone something to pay for. And the silly tab thing where you can see the whole web page is really not that interesting. I'm curious... for those of you who have stuck with Omniweb... why?
-Kevin

 

[svenr]

I do like Omniweb's handling of tabs. I like especially that you can move tabs around, even from one window to another. If you find the thumbnails too big, you can switch to list mode and see the page title instead, like with other browsers. Of course, you can fit MANY more tabs in a vertical list this way.

But I actually think the thumbnails are useful because often, pages have similar names. Right now, I have three Reply tabs open here in MacRumors and they're all called "Forums - Reply to Topic". How to tell which is which in Safari's tabs? Since I quoted in most of them, the thumbnails make it easier, I can tell by the shape of the quoted text. Or doing research in a news paper archive and every article's page title starts with the name of the news paper. If you have many tabs open, Safari truncates the titles and all you see is 10 times "Wall Street Jour..."

There are some rendering problems though. I had trouble with the Chinese interface of Yahoo Mail, for example. It looked all whacko although Safari with the same rendering engine has no problems. I'm still evaluating, I think there are some good ideas, but I'm not sure if I will pay $20? $30? for it.

 

[iLikeMyiMac]

I tried it but it wouldn't work on gmail so I went back to safari.

 

[Catfish_Man]

Back in the day, I used to use Omniweb everyday for browsing. But after the gecko browsers and Safari came out, I never really went back to Omniweb. I decided to give it a go today. Heh. This thing is just as slow as it used to be. The interface isn't half as intuitive as Camino, Firefox, or Safari's. It renders the pages half as well. It's twice as slow. It sucks for a free browser, let alone something to pay for. And the silly tab thing where you can see the whole web page is really not that interesting. I'm curious... for those of you who have stuck with Omniweb... why?
-Kevin

Well, let's see... it renders pages exactly like Safari 1.0, and shortly will render them exactly like 1.2.2. The interface is much more intuitive and powerful, it's much faster than it used to be and will be getting much faster again shortly, and the tabs are great (and can be compacted to just show the title). Also, site specific prefs are great and I think the text looks better in Omniweb than in other browsers.

hmmm.... maybe this stuff is a matter of opinion?

<edit> GMail will work in 5.1 </edit>

 

[spaceballl]

Omniweb is constantly playing catch-up while the other browsers are innovating and getting faster.

 

[Catfish_Man]

Omniweb is constantly playing catch-up while the other browsers are innovating and getting faster.

Or, one could say "Other browsers are constantly playing catch-up while Omniweb adds features like ad blocking/site specific prefs/work spaces/omnitabs/zoomed text editor/etc..." (yes, I know other browsers have ad blocking now, Omni had it first. Hence the catch up)

Now that Apple is doing all the rendering engine development for Omni, I think they're in a pretty good position.

(posted in Safari though, I like my speed. I'm looking forward to 5.1)