[mindwaves]

I tried the heavyweight (IE 5.5) and the underdogs (iCab and OmniWeb) and I can honestly say that all three of them are terrible in Mac OS X (I have not tried iCab under OS 9). I am not a html expert for sure but here are some examples: Omniweb would not load apple.excite.com and could not load google.com with a search query. The interface of OmniWeb is sooooo terrible that I almost couldn't stand it. The stop and reload buttons are at the far right with the back bottom being on the far left. What a dumb idea!! The OmniWeb bookmarks were terrible too (for many reasons) and the preferences panel was just blah. The page rendering was sooooo slow on many things and I really hate it when the little progress buttons would get incrementalliy larger. I mean, it should be a fixed size and not get larger. I also hate the download manager (not too usefull, it won't show my last downloads) and I hate when it puts the urls in the tittle bar when I mouse over them.
iCab is very very nice despite some problems. It loads pages extremely quickly and nice except for this page which is very terrible under iCab. It loads the pages that OminWeb could not do and many more. I thought that the interface would be childish but it is not. I guessed that I beased my opinion on earlier versions of iCab before when the interface was beyond useable. The interface is very clean and crisp and the preferences panel is very very nice with many options, which is a big plus especiallay with cookies. Also, it would not load Quicktime movies which is bad but I can live with it.
IE is just terrible. Although, I find the interface to be the best (but not by much), it is lacking many things. A more expeansive cookie manager would be nice like iCab. Also, IE rendered the pages fairly fast with no noticeable errors and even loaded the quicktime movies right. But the biggest fault with IE is that it has the spinning wheel constantly which shows that it is just a cheap carbon port. Hopefully it will get better. Also, IE is very crash prone.

Overall, I love iCab and that is what I am using right now and maybe even in OS 9.

[brown monk]

I'm not a fan of iCab as you are but I do think that Apple should just <b>BUY IT</b> and have its own browser. Who better to make a browser for Apple's products than Apple themselves...right?

I say Apple should buy iCab because its already a decent product. (Remember SoundJam kids?). They would probably make it look a bit 'prettier' and make it more stable. The name wont have to change as much either: Apple's browser, iBrowser!

[JB72]

I think if they can get an office product up to par (Appleworks 7 and/or a good StarOffice port,) they could buy a icab or Opera and do a really nice cocoa browser, and break the shackles of M$ once and for all.

BTW nice mini-review Mindwaves. I've had the same bad experiences with Omniweb, but I'm hoping they improve.



------------------
JB71.338x

Dock Pervert? You bet your ascot I am!

Originally posted by brown monk:
I'm not a fan of iCab as you are but I do think that Apple should just <b>BUY IT</b> and have its own browser. Who better to make a browser for Apple's products than Apple themselves...right?

I say Apple should buy iCab because its already a decent product. (Remember SoundJam kids?). They would probably make it look a bit 'prettier' and make it more stable. The name wont have to change as much either: Apple's browser, iBrowser!

Why should they buy it? Kraus updates it pretty frequently, I doubt Apple would keep it up. OK, it isn't a gem and maybe Apple could give it's GUI the works, but don't forget, Apple also tried that on Sherlock and QT... On the other hand Aqua is awesome, ah, that's another topic I guess.

iCab has been able to stay around (beta, no price, no charge) for quite a time now. I don't think Kraus needs Apple's "help" at the moment. A lot of people already want to pay Kraus and he won't even take their money yet. So I guess everything is sugar pie.

Stable? It's rock solid. You can bet your *#! on that. It's never crashed on me and it's hella fast compared to IE or NS. Although I've never compared it to Opera or Omni. OK, lynx will blow it away, but then again lynx's graphic rendering is not too good.

scl

Originally posted by mindwaves:
iCab is very very nice despite some problems. It loads pages extremely quickly and nice except for this page which is very terrible under iCab.
...
Overall, I love iCab and that is what I am using right now and maybe even in OS 9.

iCab is indeed very fast. I hear quite a few people complaining about iCab not rendering right. I even experience some problems with it on this board (column title cells not aligned right). But I don't quite get it. iCab renders very exactly complying to W3C HTML4 and I get the impresssion that iCab's rendering right, but web designers screw up pretty much. My homepage for example is W3C HTML4 compliant and iCab renders it just right. NS4 however shifts a gif off alignment and under IE it gets rendered OK, but the appearance is horrible. Maybe forums.macnn.com is the culprit? W3C validator just threw tons of errors at me when I validated the forum pages that don't get rendered "right" by iCab. I didn't sift through them to see exactly what the problems were (after all what does macnn have admins for) but I bet a Havanna, that if this forum's HTML gets its act up, iCab will be just showing it wonderfully.

scl

[MacFan]

IE 5 continues to grind slowly along even on the newer builds of OSX. iCab and OmniWeb are still betas and are in need of improvement. Both have also shown good progress from their earlier beta builds. As Apple has created a mail app to help us ditch outlook express I am looking for them to develop a cocoa browser so that we can ditch IE. If they don't come up with it I am sure that the gang at iCab or Omniweb will deliver so that I can ditch IE.

[dark3lf]

Also of interest is that IE in the PB is 5.5b(x) and in the latest leaked release, it is IE 5.1b(x).

[Ron Goodman]

I think OmniWeb is by far the "prettiest" and makes the best use of Aqua. iCab is still faster for me, in spite of occasional crashes. I keep them both in the dock and use either. I still have to run Netscape 4.7 under Classic to do my banking--I haven't been able to get Netscape 6.01 to even load under Classic yet.

[griffman]

The biggest hole in iCab at the moment is support for CSS. Without this, I really can't use it as my full-time browser. There are many sites I browse that use CSS to control the look and feel of the pages. These tend to break badly in iCab, rendering some of them basically unreadable. Try visiting www.voodooextreme.com in iCab and IE, and you'll see what I mean.

Once CSS support is up and running, I could see using it as a near primary browser. I still like OmniWeb's page rendering and GUI better than iCab's, and think IE has the best interface of all of them, and does a good job at rendering pages for the most part. All three of them are very usable on OS X, and it's nice to have the choices available! On the other hand, trying to design for all three of them is a pain at the moment!

BTW, I've had no troubles with OmniWeb and google; I use it all the time, and it works perfectly - what error are you experiencing?

-rob.

[This message has been edited by griffman (edited 02-15-2001).]

[Millennium]

I do agree that OmniWeb has its problems. The nonstandard placement of Stop and Reload buttons, the absence of asynchronous feedback concerning looping (usually provided by a throbber in other browsers), and the pervasively multithreaded downloading (which is fine on fast connections but slows modems to an unbearable crawl) are things that have simply got to be amended.

However, it's really not all that bad. The bookmarks work well, and the rendering is decent if not perfect (it's still a beta after all).

My money's behind the native shell for Gecko, however (I don't remember the name). All of Mozilla's strengths, none of its weaknesses. That would seriously rule.

[mitchell_pgh]

1) Apple should NOT buy a browser (remember cyberdog)
2) Apple should give Netscape a few programmers or cash to build a Cocoa version of Netscape Navigator. Or perhaps Apple should take an OpenSource browser and build a Cocoa version... Something to show that they really support open source.

Apple needs a few real world Cocoa apps to show off the true power of OSX

[tom@bluesky.org]

OmniWeb may have some problems, but I believe it is the only Cocoa browser out there. It is the only one that can use the OS X advanced Unicode capabilities, so that, for example, you can use a single big font to view a web page written in 20 different languages. While this might not be essential to a lot of folks now, it's where things need to go in the future.

[Ken at Omni]

Thanks for the feedback, mindwaves! Let me see if I can address some of your concerns about OmniWeb.

Originally posted by mindwaves:
I am not a html expert for sure but here are some examples: Omniweb would not load apple.excite.com and could not load google.com with a search query.

OmniWeb 4.0 beta 9 is intended for use on Mac OS X Public Beta. The problem you're encountering is that you're running a post-Public Beta release of the system where Apple has removed the "Zip" framework, and OmniWeb is trying to use that Zip framework to decode gzip-encoded pages (like excite and google).

If you remove the inflate.plugin from OmniWeb (which is what links against the Zip framework), you'll find those pages load just fine (as OmniWeb will stop telling the server that it can decode gzip when it can't).

The stop and reload buttons are at the far right with the back bottom being on the far left. What a dumb idea!!

In an ideal world, users would never need the "Stop" and "Reload" buttons: they simply exist to overcome limitations of the technology (clients, servers, and network). We happen to think that the placement is actually quite nice, but more recent builds of OmniWeb sport a configurable toolbar (with the address field in the center by default).

The page rendering was sooooo slow on many things and I really hate it when the little progress buttons would get incrementalliy larger. I mean, it should be a fixed size and not get larger.

The notion here was that we're trying to provide the user with two axes of information, the amount loaded and the amount that we will load, and unfortunately we can't know in advance the amount we will be loading. Rather than shrinking the amount loaded (to convey that it's a smaller percentage of the total amount) we elected to grow the total (so you don't feel like you're going backwards).

That said, we've decided that most people really aren't interested in that level of information--they just want to know whether the page is loading or not--so recent builds simply indicate that a page is still loading through a simple "chasing arrows" animation.

I also hate the download manager (not too usefull, it won't show my last downloads)

Beta 9 didn't have a real download manager (though you could monitor them through our network activity panel), but current builds do.

and I hate when it puts the urls in the tittle bar when I mouse over them.

We're switching back to displaying the target address using a popup "tooltip" window (like the one that displays when you hover over a navigation button at the top of the window), as we used to do in OmniWeb 3.

In our current build, we've also completely rewritten our support for Cascading Style Sheets, added URL auto-completion, Netscape plug-in support (for QuickTime and iTools), and more. Unfortunately, current builds of OmniWeb don't run on Public Beta, so we won't be able to release any of this to the public until March 24.

Again, thanks for the feedback!

Ken,

Thanks for taking the time to put your responses into this forum! I am very pleased with OmniWeb and always looking forward to its latest refinements.

If I may ask you a question about the business, rather than technical, aspect of OmniWeb, I'd like to know how it will be distributed in the future. Obviously, people on these forums know of its existence, but new computer users have only heard of Netscape and IE, and are rapidly forgetting about Netscape. How can Omni reach out to these people? How will it establish a large user base so that word-of-mouth and press make it self-sustaining? Finally, is there a chance that OmniWeb will be bundled with OS X?

Thank you!

[Mr Scruff]

Heheh. It must be really galling for a poor honest developer to have to read criticism like this in forums. Kudos to Omni for always responding so promptly and politely to peoples issues with their products.

If there was such thing as a 'Mac-like' company - you'd be it! Even if you are NeXT.

[Gametes]

Dangit Ken, I was gonna defend OmniWeb like a zealot here, but you beat me to it! No fair!
Well, to address in a different fashion, the major strengths of OW's UI:

1) The stop button and Throbber have blended into one: Why be seperate? Stop only needs work when a page is loading, so if it works (isn't dimmed out), you know a page is loading! Perfect solution to a problem tht used to have 2 seperate indicators!
2) The address bar and mouseover link indicator have been blended into one: why be separate? Both indicate an address! It's perfect! (Ken: you guys at Omni think you get to decide the UI; you are wrong. I decide. Do NOT go back the way you are saying you will, or I will tell your mothers on you!)
2) The progress bar expands when more things are being dowloaded. This is an awesome feature, even if it does get out of hand on large websites (perhaps different colored buttons for different quantities? perhaps they dissapear when the download is complete?).
3) The autohiding message bar (at the bottom of the browser window): It only shows up when it is in action, a great idea. All screen space must be saved all the time. In my opinion, every widget, titlebar, menubar, dock, EVERYTHING, should hide just like the dock when not in use.

See, OmniWeb has a respect for unifying different elements, like the Dock unifies so many. This is the best UI philosophy ever, and needs to be followed more religiously by more parties. Anytime one object can perform another's function, you downsize the latter and give the former a raise. Any office manager can tell you that!

---

On an entirely different note:
I get sick to my stomach looking at windows and seeing integrated microsoft products everywhere. apps like IE and Outlook that can't be removed from the desktop, so new users are forced to use them, etc. I also get sick of microsoft having a generic response to every software out there.
IE, Outlook, Word, Windows, Movie, Just EVERYTHING! I hate how they have their own mediocre copy of everything then shove it down your throat.

Bu why is it we applaud when Apple does the same thing. I mean, I know that mail and iTunes are great programs, but is it just my own blindness that makes me think having everybody have an iTools account that is totally integrated with the OS is a good idea (cool! it's integrated, that way it works better with Apple stuff!), but it would be "microsoft trying to oppress competition" again if they did the same thing to undermine Yahoo or whatever???

Why is Apple "building the whole widget" not only acceptable, but encouraged (now apple should build their own browser? wtf!)? Why is it amoral for microsoft to do so?

Think about it.

------------------
"This works that doesn't apple locked root out will it come back this hardware no longer kernal panics means apple going backwards this or that software now crashes..... build 4k29 ak47 On and on." -Scott_H, the one and only English mutilating, word modulating, Mac OS X moderator.
All that matters to me is the Dock perversion.

[mindwaves]

To Ken:

Thank you for addressing these issues so rapidly. I am pleased to here that most (maybe all) of my problems will be addressed in the later versions of OmniWeb and when Omni does release a new version of OmniWeb, then I will be glad to give it a web-test. Thnaks again!

[Gametes]

Oh and Ken: Wow, that's pretty wierd that I sent an email to Omni saying the address bar ought to be between the reload and info buttons, and now it is. Was I a final vote cast in a heated debate at OmniUI? Cool!

[Ken at Omni]

Originally posted by Lazarus Long:
If I may ask you a question about the business, rather than technical, aspect of OmniWeb, I'd like to know how it will be distributed in the future. Obviously, people on these forums know of its existence, but new computer users have only heard of Netscape and IE, and are rapidly forgetting about Netscape. How can Omni reach out to these people?

I think that having OmniWeb be the first product listed on Apple's Mac OS X downloads page (www.apple.com/macosx/downloads/) and being included on everyone's iDisk are definitely steps in that direction, but ultimately the best way to be visible to everyone is to ship with the operating system.

How will it establish a large user base so that word-of-mouth and press make it self-sustaining?

I think our job is to build the best web browser possible. Word-of-mouth and good press will follow from that.

Finally, is there a chance that OmniWeb will be bundled with OS X?

We would love to be (we were bundled with developer relesaes of Rhapsody and with Mac OS X Server 1.0), but clearly that's a decision for Apple to make. Again, the better we make our product the more likely that Apple will want to bundle it.

So I'll bet you can guess where our focus is.

Some other recently-added goodies include incremental display of tables so pages feel like they're loading much faster, better bookmarks management (you can select multiple entries now and drag them all at once), and integration with KeyChain.

Originally posted by Gametes:
The address bar and mouseover link indicator have been blended into one: why be separate? Both indicate an address! It's perfect! (Ken: you guys at Omni think you get to decide the UI; you are wrong. I decide. Do NOT go back the way you are saying you will, or I will tell your mothers on you!)

It's just a little too subtle, and we like being able to eliminate the label on the field (which we currently need to say whether it's displaying the page's address or a link's address). Popup windows take up no window real estate, so I think we're pretty happy with that approach.

The autohiding message bar (at the bottom of the browser window): It only shows up when it is in action, a great idea.

Thanks for the vote of confidence! The down side is that many HTML pages are sensitive to their available height changing, so they flash a little too much as the browser status changes. We experimented with having the status hover over the page (in fact, that's what we did in OmniWeb 3, only it was in the top right corner of the page rather than the bottom) but people find that distracting and it sometimes gets in the way of controls (like scrollbars).

The new chasing arrows are optional: a lot of people like them because the stop button lighting up was (again) a little too subtle, but if you don't want them you can just remove them from your toolbar.

Wow, that's pretty wierd that I sent an email to Omni saying the address bar ought to be between the reload and info buttons, and now it is. Was I a final vote cast in a heated debate at OmniUI?

The problem with putting the address field there is that you really have to get rid of some of the other things on the toolbar or the resulting text field is too narrow to display much of the URL (especially on an iBook with a drawer open). Now that we have a customizable toolbar, it's pretty natural that people might want to put the address up there (replacing some other items) rather than on its own line. (Both options are still available, though, and I don't know which we'll decide to use as the default in the final 4.0 release.)


[This message has been edited by Ken at Omni (edited 02-15-2001).]

[crazyjohnson]

Hows this sound: Opera on OS X!

[limberger]

Ken! This is just great to have your input on this board... Question: you being a developer, perhaps you could comment on the benefits of the Cocoa environment in OS X with the UNIX underpinnings versus the proposed .net strategy of the 800 lb. gorilla? Do you know anything of .net? Also, how do Carbon and Cocoa compare in your opinion? Do you think that Cocoa offers enough (or will) to really pull in more developers for OS X?

Thanks man!

------------------
Thanks for hearing me out. Remember, after hydrogen, stupidity is the most common element in the universe.


Nik Langlois
Mastermind Design
http://www.mastermindesign.com/

[limbotron]

A agree that all the browsers on X need work.

That said, we've decided that most people really aren't interested in that level of information--they just want to know whether the page is loading or not--so recent builds simply indicate that a page is still loading through a simple "chasing arrows" animation.

I'd suggest looking at MSN Explorer (yes I know heresey). The way they show progress is really great...a simple highlight over the url. Very subtle but clear. Gets the job done. HI inovation from MS that works!! Woohoo! I have to admit I'm also a big fan of the way they do drawers in Explorer 5.

Also in addition to the standard suggestions: more speed, a way to turn off anti-aliasing, filtering banners, and so on, I'd suggest a way to change out button sets. The current ones are kinda ugly. These should include default bookmark/toolbar icons.

Now that we have a customizable toolbar,

Requests:

1. ability to add + or - buttons for larger and smaller text.

2. the ability to add folders within the bookmarks with pulldowns

----
Another suggestion: in the history pane and bookmark panes, it would be nice to have a filter field on top.... type "sch" and have the list filtered down to http://www.schwab.com and http://www.schwartz.com for example.

[dn15]

I've tried OmniWeb and it's nice but I have a few comments or suggestions for those of you at Omni...
- No matter how many times I hide the favorites bar it always comes back in the next new browser window. I never use the favorites bar in any browser and I would really like to make it permanently go away in OW.
- Text doesn't look right most of the time... it's either too big or too small. (see http://www.versiontracker.com/ for an example). Changing to other default fonts doesn't seem to help.
- By default I don't think it should antialias the really small font sizes. (Again, see the left column of the VersionTracker site for an example of where antialiasing just makes it worse.)
- I also have to agree that I don't like the placement of stop and reload. Whenever I use OmniWeb and need to use one of those buttons, it takes a while looking at the top of the window before I finally remember that they are over where the throbber should be.

There are things I like about it, however, such as scroll wheel support, configurable tray in the preferences, and the fact that it's Cocoa so that I can drop down a menu without having everything stop. Keep up the good work!

[Gametes]

Set your browser window up the way you like it, then in the "Browser" menutab all the way at the bottom select "Save window layout". Now all new windows will look normal.

I agree about the fonts though. They look good, but there's not enough control in my opinion.

[Ken at Omni]

Originally posted by limberger:
Question: you being a developer, perhaps you could comment on the benefits of the Cocoa environment in OS X with the UNIX underpinnings versus the proposed .net strategy of the 800 lb. gorilla? Do you know anything of .net? Also, how do Carbon and Cocoa compare in your opinion? Do you think that Cocoa offers enough (or will) to really pull in more developers for OS X?

Cocoa is an truly amazing development environment. It's the primary reason I'm now developing software for the Macintosh, so I guess it already is pulling in more developers.

I prefer to develop software on the platform that makes me the most productive: if I can produce five software titles--or one software title that's five times as good--in the same amount of time as it would take me to produce one software title on another platform, I'd much rather accomplish more even if it means I have a more limited audience. (That is, of course, the only reason we stuck with NeXT through the years.)

I don't really know much about Microsoft's .NET strategy. It seems like the goal of the technology is to get where NeXT's Portable Distributed Objects were ten years ago, which is certainly useful enough as a tool but nothing that I find that terribly interesting. On the business side, it sort of seems like they're trying to take us back into the 70s, with PCs turning into very smart terminals and with Microsoft providing the mainframes, charging users by the hour for access to their software. I guess that strategy has worked well enough for Asheron's Call, but I'm not sure people really want to go back to that model for word processing and spreadsheets.

But maybe if I knew more about .NET I'd find it more exciting. I'm certainly no authority on the subject.

As for Carbon, it's pretty nice for a non-object-oriented toolkit, but I'm sure glad I don't have to use it most of the time. (Still, it's nice that it's there and that I can call it from Cocoa when I need it, just like it's nice that BSD is there when I need it.)

Originally posted by limbotron:
Also in addition to the standard suggestions: more speed,

More speed is definitely coming, but please let me how you're measuring "speed."

For example, I've usually found that beta 9 finishes loading a page faster than iCab, but iCab starts displaying the page sooner--this discovery led to our new support for incremental table display, so you don't have to wait for a table to load before seeing anything.

I also found that there were some pages that were scrolling slowly. We've optimized this somewhat since beta 9:

The first thing we did was to choose internal representations that Quartz can render more quickly: this helped a lot with grayscale jpeg images, for example.

The next thing we discovered is that Cocoa's application kit now redraws a view whenever you reposition it even if drawing is turned off on the window (unlike the behavior in Mac OS X Server). This meant that our former optimization of turning off window drawing during consecutive scrolling events was actually hurting things: they were spending all the time drawing everything anyway, but we weren't ever displaying it to the user (a very fast operation at that point) and were just falling further and further behind. Now that we know what's going on, we now collect all pending scrolling events and reposition the view once, then immediately flush it, and as a result scrolling feels much smoother.

But those are just two ways of measuring speed, what way did you have in mind?

a way to turn off anti-aliasing,

Look in preferences under Display for "Anti-alias text larger than [x] points". Try setting that value to 12 or 16, or if you just hate it completely set it to 100 or so. (Note: changing this value requires a restart of OmniWeb, because Apple's underlying libraries only read this preference at application launch.)

filtering banners, and so on,

Look in preferences under Images. There are two settings you want, "Inline images: load only if on same site" and "skip suspected ads". The "only if on same site" preferences stops all images that load from another web site (killing all those web bugs) and the "skip suspected ads" filters out images that match the size of the typical banner ad.

I'd suggest a way to change out button sets. The current ones are kinda ugly. These should include default bookmark/toolbar icons.

Rick has made an all-new set of toolbar icons for our new customizable toolbar. Perhaps you'll like them better.

We probably won't get around to doing customizable toolbar sets for 4.0, but you can always just reach into the application and replace the .tiff files.

1. ability to add + or - buttons for larger and smaller text.

Our new customizable toolbar has options for changing the font size.

2. the ability to add folders within the bookmarks with pulldowns

We're making the context menus in Bookmarks match the context menus in Favorites. (Favorites already has a "New Folder" option.)

In the mean time, did you know that you can just hit click on your bookmarks drawer and hit "Return" to add a folder? (Alternatively, you can select "Add Blank Bookmark" from the Bookmarks menu.)

Another suggestion: in the history pane and bookmark panes, it would be nice to have a filter field on top.... type "sch" and have the list filtered down to http://www.schwab.com and http://www.schwartz.com for example.

This sounds a lot like the way address completion now works: if you type "sch" in the URL field in the browser, a sheet pops down listing all the items from your bookmarks and history which contain "sch".

Right now, you can also use the Find panel (it's in the Edit menu, or just hit Command-F) to search your bookmarks for "sch", using Command-G (Find Next) to cycle through the various matches. Is this sufficient for what you're wanting to do?

Originally posted by dn15:
No matter how many times I hide the favorites bar it always comes back in the next new browser window.

You can solve this by configuring a browser window the way you want it, then selecting "Save Window Layout" from the Browser menu. (This is also how you tell OmniWeb that you'd prefer a different default window size or position.)

Text doesn't look right most of the time... it's either too big or too small. (see http://www.versiontracker.com/ for an example). Changing to other default fonts doesn't seem to help.

Internet Explorer defaults to using Times New Roman 16. When I set that as my default font in OmniWeb, I get the exact same font faces and sizes from non-CSS pages. (CSS support is coming, but it isn't in beta 9.)

By default I don't think it should antialias the really small font sizes. (Again, see the left column of the VersionTracker site for an example of where antialiasing just makes it worse.)

I think the text there looks fine, but the blurry underlines are certainly annoying. That's a known bug in Cocoa's text rendering (you can see it in TextEdit as you scale a font down to 9pt, 8pt, etc.) and hopefully Apple will fix it for Mac OS X 1.0.

I also have to agree that I don't like the placement of stop and reload. Whenever I use OmniWeb and need to use one of those buttons, it takes a while looking at the top of the window before I finally remember that they are over where the throbber should be.

The nice thing about the configurable toolbar is that you can now place them where you want. (Personally, I never use Stop: I either hit the back arrow or I close the window.)

There are things I like about it, however, such as scroll wheel support, configurable tray in the preferences, and the fact that it's Cocoa so that I can drop down a menu without having everything stop. Keep up the good work!

Thanks!

[Group51]

Originally posted by MacFan:
IE 5 continues to grind slowly along even on the newer builds of OSX. iCab and OmniWeb are still betas and are in need of improvement. Both have also shown good progress from their earlier beta builds. As Apple has created a mail app to help us ditch outlook express I am looking for them to develop a cocoa browser so that we can ditch IE. If they don't come up with it I am sure that the gang at iCab or Omniweb will deliver so that I can ditch IE.

I think that 5 year agreement runs out in 2002(?), that the one where Apple has to load IE as the default browser on every mac it makes. Don't forget that.

Chris

[Group51]

Originally posted by Ron Goodman:
I still have to run Netscape 4.7 under Classic to do my banking

Really? I found that Omni did a good impression of Netscape 4.x to my bank, so the banking worked fine. (Barclays UK)

Chris

[Group51]

Originally posted by Ken at Omni:
Thanks!

Sweet Jesus! Is this what Steve Jobs meant by Cocoa being a fast application development environment? Netscape should drop tools and switch to Cocoa, they are glacial compared to you!

I think if it isn't bundled with MacOSX, I may have to buy it!

[Gametes]

Netscape should just die. Who needs it when you have OmniWeb?

[frawgz]

Originally posted by Ken at Omni:
[B]Rick has made an all-new set of toolbar icons for our new customizable toolbar. Perhaps you'll like them better.

We probably won't get around to doing customizable toolbar sets for 4.0, but you can always just reach into the application and replace the .tiff files./B]

Wow - please tell me these are a la Apple's new customizable toolbar? Will OmniWeb come with a toolbar lozenge soon?

[pmcd]

This is the main concern I have with OmniWeb (and I guess this would be the case with any non-Netscape/IE browser). Most plug-ins seem to be targeted at Netscape. So how hard would it be to automatically support Netscape plug-ins (all of them)? Or will the Omnigroup people have to write a new plug-in for every new thing that comes out? I guess I'm slightly confused by plug-ins. Couldn't this concept be applied at the system level and exported to applications that need them?

Philip

Originally posted by Ken at Omni:

In our current build, we've also completely rewritten our support for Cascading Style Sheets, added URL auto-completion, Netscape plug-in support (for QuickTime and iTools), and more.

[This message has been edited by pmcd (edited 02-15-2001).]

[Ken at Omni]

Originally posted by frawgz:
Wow - please tell me these are a la Apple's new customizable toolbar? Will OmniWeb come with a toolbar lozenge soon?

That's what we've done, yes.

Originally posted by pmcd:
This is the main concern I have with OmniWeb (and I guess this would be the case with any non-Netscape/IE browser). Most plug-ins seem to be targeted at Netscape. So how hard would it be to automatically support Netscape plug-ins (all of them)?

That, too, is exactly what we've done.

[JB72]

Wow way to go Omni guys. Can't wait to see this new Omniweb with OS X final. Sounds great.



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JB71.338x

Dock Pervert? You bet your ascot I am!

Another suggestion: in the history pane and bookmark panes, it would be nice to have a filter field on top.... type "sch" and have the list filtered down to http://www.schwab.com and http://www.schwartz.com for example.

This sounds a lot like the way address completion now works: if you type "sch" in the URL field in the browser, a sheet pops down listing all the items from your bookmarks and history which contain "sch".

Right now, you can also use the Find panel (it's in the Edit menu, or just hit Command-F) to search your bookmarks for "sch", using Command-G (Find Next) to cycle through the various matches. Is this sufficient for what you're wanting to do?

-I have the same wish. All of these options you mention are nice but I have so many bookmarks that sometimes I would just like to see a filtered non-alphabetical list... (in other words, typing sch would show ALL bookmarks that contain "sch"...not just ones that begin with sch). The first time I saw this was in Outlook Express where email lists can be filtered by "subject" "contains" ________. Now iTunes has an excellent implementation (wouldn't it also be nice on finder windows!). Browserwise it would be really useful is in the bookmark pane, because when you have hundreds of bookmarks finding the one you are looking for becomes a major issue. The smart popdown is nice and works well, but sometimes you just want to browse through your bookmarks. Adding this feature would really help.

RE: non-anti-aliased text. I'm not in X right now, but if I remember correctly turning off antialiasing only affected text within web pages, not within the browser itself. Turning off ALL anti-aliased text below a certain point size would be nice. [also if I remember correctly Cocoa renders non-anti-aliased text less nicely than Carbon...we should all complain about this.]

Thanks for listening. Just knowing someone is out there listening warms my little apple shaped heart.

[gorgonzola]

Originally posted by Simon C. Leemann:
iCab is indeed very fast. I hear quite a few people complaining about iCab not rendering right. I even experience some problems with it on this board (column title cells not aligned right). But I don't quite get it. iCab renders very exactly complying to W3C HTML4 and I get the impresssion that iCab's rendering right, but web designers screw up pretty much. My homepage for example is W3C HTML4 compliant and iCab renders it just right. NS4 however shifts a gif off alignment and under IE it gets rendered OK, but the appearance is horrible. Maybe forums.macnn.com is the culprit? W3C validator just threw tons of errors at me when I validated the forum pages that don't get rendered "right" by iCab. I didn't sift through them to see exactly what the problems were (after all what does macnn have admins for) but I bet a Havanna, that if this forum's HTML gets its act up, iCab will be just showing it wonderfully.

scl

Try this -- go to the W3C website (www.w3.org) and post back how many errors iCab gives you...

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the oddball newsletter
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it's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything

[dn15]

Ken at Omni: Thank you for your responses to my comments regarding OmniWeb. iCab has been my browser of choice for Mac OS X, but now it's about even. After making the suggested changes in my preferences, my opinion of OmniWeb has increased greatly. (Now the fonts are more the way I like them, and it starts up with the window in the position and configuration that I want.)
From what I hear on this board, it will only get better. I wish you luck on getting OmniWeb included with Mac OS X or bundled with new Macs!

[gorgonzola]

Originally posted by Gametes:
But why is it we applaud when Apple does the same thing. I mean, I know that mail and iTunes are great programs, but is it just my own blindness that makes me think having everybody have an iTools account that is totally integrated with the OS is a good idea (cool! it's integrated, that way it works better with Apple stuff!), but it would be "microsoft trying to oppress competition" again if they did the same thing to undermine Yahoo or whatever???

Why is Apple "building the whole widget" not only acceptable, but encouraged (now apple should build their own browser? wtf!)? Why is it amoral for microsoft to do so?

It's not amoral, it's just bad implementation. The way MS does its "integration" is stapling the browser and the OS together at the hip, which prevents choice. You don't *have* to use iTools -- you can use other services if you like. It's just that since Apple has OS-level support for iTools (popping up on the desktop, etc) there will probably be more reasons to get iTools because it's easier.

For example, Music Player.app. Or the upcoming iTunes for X. These will be bundled and standard (and integrated), yes, but this doesn't remove the amount of choice you have. QT streaming is extremely integrated, but watching a RealNetworks stream is no problem.

What Microsoft does is to integrate (which at some level is good), but then to not allow detachment and not allow other apps to take its place. This is what we complain about.

I think there's an important distinction.

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the oddball newsletter
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it's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything

[gorgonzola]

Sorry to get off topic, btw.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what MS can pull to compare to this great-sounding version of OW for Final.

The fact that Omni actually listens to users and changes things on their behalf (more importantly, provides the options to do so) is possibly the biggest plus on their side.

My question to Ken is this: is it possible for OmniWeb to display multiple fonts in a single page? Sometimes pages do this, and sometimes it's nice. OW beta 9 forces me to draw the entire page in a single font, be it Times, or Lucida, or Arial. Is this an implemented feature? If not, please explain why you left it out. I'd be interested in your reasons; you sound like a smart bunch of design guys!

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the oddball newsletter
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it's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything

Originally posted by pmcd:
This is the main concern I have with OmniWeb (and I guess this would be the case with any non-Netscape/IE browser). Most plug-ins seem to be targeted at Netscape. So how hard would it be to automatically support Netscape plug-ins (all of them)? Or will the Omnigroup people have to write a new plug-in for every new thing that comes out? I guess I'm slightly confused by plug-ins. Couldn't this concept be applied at the system level and exported to applications that need them?

I'm confused. Which plug-ins are we discussing? I personally like the current OW flash plug in. Even though it doesn't work correcty all the time, the animation is finally at the level of the Windows plug in. Isn't quicktime part of OSX? Can't OW tap into that ability instead of using a Netscape plug in?

[dark3lf]

Hi Ken, love OW. Anyway, will the build released after March 24 have full Java support?

[pmcd]

Well I am talking about all of them. For example, the pdf plug-in. I don't know the reason
for the QT situation. I would have thought it would be similar to tapping into Java. There's
more than meets the eye to "plug-ins"...

Philip

Originally posted by Just curious:
I'm confused. Which plug-ins are we discussing? I personally like the current OW flash plug in. Even though it doesn't work correcty all the time, the animation is finally at the level of the Windows plug in. Isn't quicktime part of OSX? Can't OW tap into that ability instead of using a Netscape plug in?

In my book, these are the only really essential plug-ins:

1. Real Networks

2. Quicktime

3. Flash/Shockwave

4. iTools

Let's hope the X browsers support at least 3 out of the 4.

[pmcd]

Well we all have our preferences. I simply can't function properly without pdf, Java and QT. I'm sure you'll get your 3 out of 4.
But the question is still what happens if your tastes change and you need other plug-ins? Will OW support them
right out of the box so to speak?

Philip

Originally posted by Kelly Girl:
In my book, these are the only really essential plug-ins:

1. Real Networks

2. Quicktime

3. Flash/Shockwave

4. iTools

Let's hope the X browsers support at least 3 out of the 4.

[NeilCharter]

I have a question for Ken.

I've been checking out printing pdf files that have been downloaded. This is how scientists can get journal articles online nowadays which is really a lot easier than trudging down to the library.

Anyway - when I download a pdf file it is opened up in preview which would be fine but printing is a bit dodgy. So can you set the preferences to open up either Acrobat (the classic version works with no problem in X) or say with OmniPDF (there still some problems with that).

hope you can help

Thank

Neil

[clebin]

One thing I'd like to ask Ken, if you're still coming back to follow this thread Ken! - is about the Bookmarks menu.

It's only a little thing, but 7 menu-items above the Bookmarks! It's just too confusing. Can you narrow it down to 1 or 2? It's seems a bit like the Microsoft school of feature overkill!

Will you be using those little Favicon.ico on that menu too? I think they're a pretty nice feature and would help to distinguish between the links and the other stuff.

Also, what is your policy on DHTML, CSS and that kind of stuff? Are you intending to stick rigidly to the W3C like Mozilla, or go for a more inclusive approach like IE?

What's your opinion on IFRAMEs, for example? I work for a portal company that uses them a lot, so I know how valuable they can be.

Keep up the good work, though. The rest of the interface is just top-notch and features like more progressive page display are exactly what I wanted to see in Omniweb.

Thanks,
Chris

[Zarafa]

Originally posted by clebin:

Also, what is your policy on DHTML, CSS and that kind of stuff? Are you intending to stick rigidly to the W3C like Mozilla, or go for a more inclusive approach like IE?

What's your opinion on IFRAMEs, for example? I work for a portal company that uses them a lot, so I know how valuable they can be.

Consider this at least one STRONG vote for strict W3C support. With Mozilla/Netscape and MacIE both adhering to standards, I'd hate to think that other browsers would start adopting the shoddy WinIE approach to things.

IFRAMES are pretty useless actually, CSS can do the same thing quite easily.

[davecom]

Opera has become bloated! I just tried using it under Virtual PC which runs at like 100 MHZ Pentium(Doesn't really say much) and it was dog slow taking maybe about a minute and thirty seconds just to start up. Then to load a page took up to 30 seconds on my cable connection!

Anyway, I truly hope Omniweb gets included with OS X Final. Also I use iCab now in OS 9. It is a great browser.(Very Fast)


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Think Different.

[davecom]

Opera has become bloated! I just tried using it under Virtual PC which runs at like 100 MHZ Pentium(Doesn't really say much) and it was dog slow taking maybe about a minute and thirty seconds just to start up. Then to load a page took up to 30 seconds on my cable connection!

Anyway, I truly hope Omniweb gets included with OS X Final. Also I use iCab now in OS 9. It is a great browser.(Very Fast)


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Think Different.

[Ken at Omni]

Wow, looks like I've fallen a bit behind! Let's see what I can do to catch up...

Originally posted by Jenn Y:
I have the same wish. All of these options you mention are nice but I have so many bookmarks that sometimes I would just like to see a filtered non-alphabetical list...

Request noted, though there's probably not time for it to make us to implement that feature for our 4.0 release on March 24. To avoid presenting a confusing interface, we'd want to flatten out the outline when entries are filtered, and then we'd need to think about how we'd want to respond to drags, etc., while in that state. I think all these problems are solvable, but we'd want to give them all some thought, and we just don't have a lot of time between now and March 24. Perhaps in 4.1...

RE: non-anti-aliased text. I'm not in X right now, but if I remember correctly turning off antialiasing only affected text within web pages, not within the browser itself. Turning off ALL anti-aliased text below a certain point size would be nice.

I thought that was actually the way that preference worked now, but if not this is really a request for Apple (as most of the non-HTML widgets are being drawn by Cocoa's application kit).

Originally posted by gorgonzola:
My question to Ken is this: is it possible for OmniWeb to display multiple fonts in a single page?

Absolutely! OmniWeb has supported changing the font face using the FONT tag since OmniWeb 2.x. If that didn't work in beta 9, it was definitely a recently-introduced bug (quite possible, I remember fixing something about that recently) and it's subsequently been fixed (as it does work in the current build).

And, of course, in our current build we now support font changes through CSS.

Originally posted by Just curious:
Which plug-ins are we discussing?

We've added general support for loading Netscape plug-ins, but so far we've only tested this support against the QuickTime and iTools plug-ins used by Internet Explorer. Others (like Real Audio) may already work great, we just haven't tested them yet.

I personally like the current OW flash plug in. Even though it doesn't work correcty all the time, the animation is finally at the level of the Windows plug in.

We've had a lot of positive feedback about our OmniWeb-native Flash plug-in, and right now we're still using it rather than loading the Netscape-compatible Flash plug-in--but as you note it doesn't work correctly all the time. (I think the big problem is that we haven't implemented all of the browser document object model hooks that some Flash movies use.)

Isn't quicktime part of OSX? Can't OW tap into that ability instead of using a Netscape plug in?

Yes, we could. This is just a matter of limited resources: we decided writing a Netscape plug-in compatibility layer would be a bigger win in the long run since it would get us other plug-ins as well. (We only have a few people working on OmniWeb.)

Originally posted by dark3lf:
Anyway, will the build released after March 24 have full Java support?

That's my goal, but unfortunately there are some issues over which I have no control and I don't know if they'll all get ironed out in time for us to have solid by then. I hope so, but if not, we'll start working on it as a separate plug-in (which is how it's implemented anyway) or add it for 4.1.

Originally posted by NeilCharter:
Anyway - when I download a pdf file it is opened up in preview which would be fine but printing is a bit dodgy. So can you set the preferences to open up either Acrobat (the classic version works with no problem in X) or say with OmniPDF (there still some problems with that).

Yes, you can do this by changing your default application for PDF in the Finder: rather than maintaining a completely redundant set of preferences for opening different types of files, we just hand them off to the Finder and tell it to open them (so you only have to configure it to open in your favorite application in one place).

To change the Finder's preferred application for PDF files, select a PDF file in the Finder, do a "Get Info" (Command-I), select "Application" from the popup, and change the default application to be whichever application you prefer for it to launch to open PDF files.

Originally posted by clebin:
It's only a little thing, but 7 menu-items above the Bookmarks! It's just too confusing. Can you narrow it down to 1 or 2? It's seems a bit like the Microsoft school of feature overkill!

We only recently (beta 7?) added bookmarks themselves to the Bookmarks menu: it was originally designed with the notion of having only those seven items in the entire menu.

Now that bookmarks themselves are in the menu, we've reduced the other items to three: "Show Bookmarks", "Add to Bookmarks", and an "Edit Bookmarks" submenu which contains all the other options (except for the ones which moved to other menus, like "New Bookmarks File..." which is now in the File menu).

Will you be using those little Favicon.ico on that menu too?

That'd be neat, but we'd first have to write a .ico image renderer since it's a Windows file format, not a standard web file format like png, jpeg, or gif. It would be awfully easy for us to implement a FavoritesIcon.png file, though! (And it could even be in 24-bit color with full transparency support.)

Also, what is your policy on DHTML, CSS and that kind of stuff? Are you intending to stick rigidly to the W3C like Mozilla, or go for a more inclusive approach like IE?

We've stuck rigidly to the W3C in the past (when we were in the early phases of developing OmniWeb 2.x in 1995, for example), and what we found was that when we stuck to those standards we couldn't display most pages the way their authors intended--and worse, rather than browsers shifting to match the spec, W3C over time changes the spec to match the browsers. (For example, HTML 3.2 allowed implicit closing of table data and row tags. We've supported this for five years, but Netscape and IE never handled those pages correctly. When W3C updated the spec for HTML 4.0, they removed the implicit table tag closing.)

So it really doesn't help to start adopting extensions before the mainstream browsers do. OmniWeb 2.x (again, back in 1995) added support for several hundred additional named entities (for math, etc.) because we thought that was an incredibly useful thing. Unfortunately, we discovered that lots of web sites didn't quote their ampersands correctly in their forms (and still don't), which meant that people using OmniWeb 2 couldn't shop at many online stores because the stores would get confused when we correctly translated the new entities (like sub, the Mathematical subset sign) that appeared on their page (but which they didn't think of as entities because their browsers didn't support them).

There's just no fixing the millions of existing web pages out there, and I think most browser users really don't care whose fault it is that a page is broken, they just want to view the page and will switch to whichever browser can do that for them.

So, the upshot of all this is that if there's any page that displays in our browser in a way other than the way the author intended it (whether or not it's because they rely on a bug in another browser), we consider that a bug in our browser. For OmniWeb 3, we removed the support for those hundreds of HTML 4.0-standard entities, because the major browsers didn't support them. (You can still edit a text file inside OmniWeb and turn them back on, or even add your own new entities, but that's really hacker territory.)

This approach does mean that over time as Netscape and IE fix their bugs, we end up having to go back and undo our bug emulations. Fortunately, we have preferences for a lot of these--I wish we had preferences for all of them. (For example, the 4.x versions of the major browsers used to have a bug where they'd always put a word on a line even if there wasn't room for it, leading to overlapping page elements. Some sites out there relied on this behavior, of course, so we ended up emulating it. IE 5.0 no longer does this, so we're going to need to get rid of it as some pages now rely on IE 5.0's behavior. Of course, on the other side of the coin, IE 5 still doesn't correctly size width=100% elements when there's a side-aligned element. Ah, the fun of emulating another browser's quirks!)

I suspect that the only reason this approach is at all practical is because it's so much easier to develop our browser (using Cocoa) than it is for them to develop theirs. (A quick example: we added frames support to OmniWeb 2 in a matter of days, which meant that we were actually the first shipping browser to support Netscape's frames extension--before they supported it in a non-beta release themselves.)

Of course, we draw the line at things which are incredibly impractical for us to do, like supporting ActiveX components. Writing a Windows emulator isn't really within our product scope.

What's your opinion on IFRAMEs, for example? I work for a portal company that uses them a lot, so I know how valuable they can be.

We have supported IFRAMEs in the past, although they're not supported at the moment due to some subsequent changes in our frame architecture. We will probably add them again in the future, though: I consider it a bug that they don't work. (Yes, authors can do the same thing using CSS-P, but if we don't support IFRAME then some pages out there won't work as intended in OmniWeb, and the people who would miss out as a result are our users.)

I'll be the first to celebrate the day the entire web becomes standards-compliant, but until then it's our job to display (as authors intended) as much of the web as we possibly can.

[King Kong]

Look in preferences under Display for "Anti-alias text larger than [x] points". Try setting that value to 12 or 16, or if you just hate it completely set it to 100 or so. (Note: changing this value requires a restart of

Shouldn't this be in the font preferences? Also shouldn't the restart requirement be noted in a dialog.

Also usually when one sets preferences, we tend to go from pane to pane (at least I do). Right now we have to keep going back up to "Show All" and then select the next set of preferences. Would be nice to just have a button to go to the next page of prefs on each page.