[Deestar]

Title says it all!

http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/5/

[gorickey]

Ummm...WOW!!

[davecom]

I used to be an OmniWeb user before Safari. IMO They had to make some amazing enhancements in 5 to convince people to switch from Safari, and it looks like they may have come through. Exciting!

[Turias]

A public beta version of OmniWeb 5.0 will be released on February 2, 2004.

I can't wait!

[foad]

I can't wait for the release of OW5. I have always liked the UI in OW but I needed tabs and the new thumbnail view in OW5 looks SWEET!

NICE WORK GUYS!

[gorickey]

Any nightlies of this by chance? If not, anybody know when or if they will?

[foad]

Originally posted by gorickey:
Any nightlies of this by chance? If not, anybody know when or if they will?

Feb 2, 2004 is when the public beta is being released.

[gorickey]

Originally posted by foad:
Feb 2, 2004 is when the public beta is being released.

Yep, I saw that after I posted....thanks!

One thing I don't see mentioned is rendering speed compared to the likes of Firebird/Safari...where will OW 5 fall?

[iOliverC]

Hmmm...I wonder where the bookmark bar is.

I like the look (except the new back/forward etc icons).

But, I wonder, what does the new tab like functionality bring over normal Safari like tabs? It seems to me that Omni's tabs waste more space than normal tabs.

[ratlater]

What are the green checkmarks on the tabs?


-matt

[Nonsuch]

Very impressive. I too wonder if the sidebar-tab implementation is a little space-inefficient; it would be cherry on my 23" Cinema Display at work, but on my dinky 17" 1024x monitor at home, I might miss the extra width for my content. Still, it looks great�kudos to the folks at Omni. I'll definitely give this a look when it hits the streets.

[ratlater]

Originally posted by iOliverC:
Hmmm...I wonder where the bookmark bar is.

I like the look (except the new back/forward etc icons).

But, I wonder, what does the new tab like functionality bring over normal Safari like tabs? It seems to me that Omni's tabs waste more space than normal tabs.

They do use a bit more space, but they have a lot more functionality. You can move the tab order around and drag tabs out into their own windows. You can also see what the page is based on the window. There is also that list view, which would use much less space. With the sidebar you could a lot of tabs and still be able to see them all. In safari if you open very many tabs the run off the edge of the window and the title is so small you can't read what page it is.

-matt

[foad]

I also wondered about the site drawer. I was curious if you could adjust thumbnail size. I think then that way you could decrease the the width of the drawer on lower resolutions.

The list view is good if you have a lot of pages open so you scroll less but the drawer adds width which is more of a issue on lower resolutions.

For the most part I can't wait for OW5!

[The Jackalope]

That has to be the most inefficient use of tabs I've ever seen.

[ratlater]

From the huge thread, a video of the tabs in action:

http://mikematas.com/omniweb5/

-matt

[Rickster]

Yes - resizing the drawer resizes the thumbnails, and they can get pretty small. Personally, I find the tabs quite useable on my 1024x768 iBook (replaced with a 15" AlBook today, yay!) and iMac at home... of course, I'm already the sort of person who hates having the browser window take up too much of the screen, so I have some free space to work with.

The green checkmarks appear on an inactive tab's thumbnail when the web page in it finishes loading. This is so you can quickly tell apart which pages you've looked at already and which of your fired-off-in-the-background pages are ready to look at.

The favorites (bookmarks) bar is still around, it's just not in some of those screenshots (like in 4.5, you can hide or show it at will). It's largely unchanged from in 4.5 (except we show favicons now).

For 5.0, rendering speed will probably not be much different from 4.5 -- our focus for this release has been on features and UI, so the WebCore/OmniWebKit stuff is pretty much unchanged. We have, however, fixed some bugs which negatively affected 4.5's performance, and we will probably spend at least some time working on optimizations before we release... so there will be some improvements. We'll be focusing more in-depth on performance and compatibility for 5.0.x and 5.x releases.

[Simon Mundy]

...and people laughed when I put forward the idea of a drawer for 'tabs' - preview-style!!!

It looks lovely, can't wait for the Beta. Look forward to putting the new engine through its paces.

[MacGorilla]

I want! I want!

[The Jackalope]

Originally posted by Simon Mundy:
...and people laughed when I put forward the idea of a drawer for 'tabs' - preview-style!!!

Actually, it's the only thing I find unappealing here. It simply takes up too much space. I mean, it's a cool option I guess, but I can just look up at the tabs under my bookmarks in Safari and see what is open and what is processing. To me, having a picture is a little too much, especially with all the space it takes (and when you collapse the pictures, the tabs STILL take up just as much horizontal space. ).

Cool idea, I just find it more of a gimmic than anything else. One that makes things worse in my opinion.

Oh well, different strokes for different folks and all I guess.

[Deestar]

Originally posted by Rickster:
For 5.0, rendering speed will probably not be much different from 4.5 -- our focus for this release has been on features and UI, so the WebCore/OmniWebKit stuff is pretty much unchanged. We have, however, fixed some bugs which negatively affected 4.5's performance, and we will probably spend at least some time working on optimizations before we release... so there will be some improvements. We'll be focusing more in-depth on performance and compatibility for 5.0.x and 5.x releases.

Will the WebCore in OmniWeb 5 be synced to Safari 1.1 or above?

[Simon Mundy]

Originally posted by The Jackalope:
Actually, it's the only thing I find unappealing here. It simply takes up too much space. I mean, it's a cool option I guess, but I can just look up at the tabs under my bookmarks in Safari and see what is open and what is processing. To me, having a picture is a little too much, especially with all the space it takes (and when you collapse the pictures, the tabs STILL take up just as much horizontal space. ).

Cool idea, I just find it more of a gimmic than anything else. One that makes things worse in my opinion.

Oh well, different strokes for different folks and all I guess.

Fair point, but which ever way you look at it there will always be a trade-off when you have multiple references to web pages within one window.

If you have a safari/mozilla-style tabs UI, you get scrunched/truncated window names which mean diddly-squat at a glance. And that's even with 3-4 open at a time. Not to also mention the old 'tabs-were-meant-for-options' argument! So while they were a good-for-the-moment kind of solution, they're certainly not optimal.

I see with this OW approach that you can either retract the drawer and reclaim some screen space, or you can have full-size thumbnails or even a list and you still have flexibility and excellent adherence to UI principles.

With safari/mozilla I can't re-order tabs, nor click-drag them, nor even click-drag to create a new tab!!! Not very Apple-like.

[Edit! Should have read some of the earlier posts ]

[natan]

Page Marking seems like quite an innovative and useful feature!

[Gul Banana]

The $9.95 upgrade price makes me Happy, and ensures that I am going to pay it. Those new features are DEFINITELY worth ten dollars. I especially like the look of workspaces, site preferences, and Safari-style bookmarks with more powerful shortcuts/keywords. I, too, am a bit dubious about the tab drawer, but need to use it to judge. Overall, Omniweb remains what it had been before for me: Safari's excellent engine, with a much better interface and more features. I'm REALLY looking forward to syncing to a newer webcore, though... if that was included I'd happily pay the full $30 all over again

[Gul Banana]

Originally posted by Deestar:
Will the WebCore in OmniWeb 5 be synced to Safari 1.1 or above?

As has been said before, 5.0 will still use Safari 1.0's engine. That will be the next update, and hopefully won't take quite so long

[Ratm]

My money is yours.

[Sven G]

While I like the new OmniWeb "tab" concept, it would be much better if it weren't confined in a drawer, but rather implemented in a Finder/iTunes/iPhoto/etc.-like sidebar (at least as an option; see also other comments in other threads): website "tabs" - in whatever form - are indeed frequently needed items, which should be readily available at any time, so the drawer concept isn't really the best suited one for them - while an integrated, Mozilla-like sidebar would be perfect.

See, for example, the PC-only iRider browser (one of the many Internet Explorer enhancements for Windows out there):



Of course, adopting a sidebar could mean a possible conflict with the Safari-like Bookmarks feature, which should then be solved in some way, without drawers, possibly: see, for example, different colors/backgrounds for the respective sidebars, and/or tabbed sidebars � la Mozilla/Konqueror, etc. Here, for example, is a screenshot of the Konqueror sidebar, with an interesting use of tabs for seeing the various available sections, such as Bookmarks, History, Home, Network, Services, and so on (click for more details):



There are indeed some possible alternatives to drawers...

[Visnaut]

Overall, I find the new thumbnail tabs a very welcome feature. It may not be the most space efficient pixel-per-pixel, but I don't think Omni would be fulfilling their purpose by making a safari tabs clone.

Sure, it's easy to envision improvements to this system. For example, it would have been neat to have windows display tabs much like safari does now, and allowing to switch between them as so, but also having a toggle whereby the tabs grow and lay themselves out across the entire window, and appear as thumbnails. Sort of like expos� for tabs. Or simply including the current tab drawer into the browser window itself (thus 'saving' space, but that gets into the whole efficiency" of drawers debate). Or perhaps a hierarchical listing of sorts much like iRider, as referenced above.

But all in all, it's an important step, any way you cut it. Like anything else, it will polarize people on the issue, but at least there's more choices out there. And perhaps it will spur Apple to be more innovative with their interfaces. Personally, although they included tabs in safari, I don't think they embraced and extended the concept in the usual Apple flair that they are capable of doing (� la iTunes, Keynote, etc.) They did it with bookmarks, improving they way we interact and organize them, but with tabs, they simply implemented them the same way they've been done before. And although thumbnail-style tabs aren't new either, at least Omni's gone out and made it easy, mac-like and powerful, especially in combination with the Workspaces feature.

Anyway, I'm rambling. My point is, although not everyone may like those tabs, it's a positive move forward, and keeps browser innovation on Mac OS X fresh. At the very least, it downplays the fears that while apple may intrude into areas where 3rd-party apps already have a market, they're not stifling innovative developers, as Omniweb 5 clearly shows.

[curmi]

Wow! They look pretty much like my suggestion to them that I posted on macnn with mockups over a year ago:

Here was the thread:

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...0&pagenumber=3

And here is my screen mockup:

http://homepage.mac.com/curmi/.Pictures/tabbed.jpg

Do I get a free Omniweb 5 licence guys?

[gyc]

Originally posted by natan:
Page Marking seems like quite an innovative and useful feature!

It seems exactly like snapback in Safari, no?

[fireside]

ill be there at MacWorld playing around with it.

[King Bob On The Cob]

Originally posted by gyc:
It seems exactly like snapback in Safari, no?

Except you can keep more than one snapback page.

[Rickster]

[page marking] seems exactly like snapback in Safari, no?

Hey, everybody's been stealing features from us the past ten years, why can't we do the reverse? Safari's SnapBack seems to be the beginning of a good (and obvious) idea; we've taken it further in OW5 by allowing you to "snap" forward as well as back, among any number of "special" points in your browser history.

For example: you use a bookmark to go to developer.apple.com, click around a few pages and then decide to do a search within one of their subsections, then click through a few pages past one of the search results. In Safari, you could SnapBack to the search results page and that's it. In OW5 you can jump back to the search results page, jump further back to the developer.apple.com, and jump forward again to the page you were on before jumping back.

[OW5's tabs] look pretty much like my suggestion to them that I posted on macnn with mockups over a year ago... Do I get a free Omniweb 5 licence guys?

Sorry curmi... we started mocking it up a couple of years ago. I remember your post, though: now I can finally say congrats for your accurate prediction.


Visnaut has a good point. We very much didn't want to do Yet Another Of The Same Tabbed-Browsing Implementation, and knew it would be nigh impossible to solve the problems of both approaches without a tradeoff. We think the solution we've arrived at provides enough benefits to be worth the space tradeoff. (Which, by the way, can be minimized; the tab drawer doesn't have to take up as much space as it does in those screenshots.) See Tim's post in the other thread for further rationale.

We know we can't please everybody, but I'd caution those of you who've been upset by our screenshots to wait until you get the chance to actually use OW5 yourself before passing your final judgment... you may find it to be more flexible than you think.

[curmi]

Originally posted by Rickster:
Sorry curmi... we started mocking it up a couple of years ago. I remember your post, though: now I can finally say congrats for your accurate prediction.

Hey, I'm just glad that you guys have vision. Back when I did that mockup, Safari had no tabs either, and I had hoped they'd do something more innovative than text tabs at the top of the screen. I was so disappointed, but I figured you guys would come through. Looks like you did!

[nickm]

but I can just look up at the tabs under my bookmarks in Safari and see what is open and what is processing.

True, but you don't know how much of it is processed. According to posts by Omni people, the OW5 thumbnails update in real time, so you can see how much of the page is loaded. Safari tabs look the same regardless of whether the page has barely started loaded or is almost done rendering, waiting on an image or two.

[Don Pickett]

Drawers are a bad idea for those of us on 1024x768 Powerbook screens.

[wjsomni]

Originally posted by Don Pickett:
Drawers are a bad idea for those of us on 1024x768 Powerbook screens.

We tested the interface on small screens quite a bit. While I don't expect everyone to necessarily love it, it's worth pointing out that if you resize the drawer the little page icons get smaller, so you still get full tab functionality in a very narrow drawer.

Since we use anti-aliasing the pages stay pretty even at very small sizes. It's pretty cool to be able to usefully see 14 or so pages at once instead of the 7 or so that traditional horizontal tabs get you.

-Wil

[kovacs]

I have only one complaint and that is that you seem to be using the full title as the name of the tab, a lot of sites use a common prefix like this one does ( MacNN Forums - Mac OSX, ... ) Safari strips the common prefix and this makes it much easier to use a lot of tabs from the same site,..

I think you did a great job but looking at the screenshot it feels like you've lost some of that Omniweb quality feel ( ie. why is the address bar square and not round like in 4.5 and why are the icons so boring, they looked better before ). It looks less like Omniweb but more like Safari Pro, guess I'll just have to wait and see, a part from these minor annoyances it is looking really good, but bad for my wallet....

[Sharky K.]

Originally posted by kovacs:
I have only one complaint and that is that you seem to be using the full title as the name of the tab, a lot of sites use a common prefix like this one does ( MacNN Forums - Mac OSX, ... ) Safari strips the common prefix and this makes it much easier to use a lot of tabs from the same site,..

I think you did a great job but looking at the screenshot it feels like you've lost some of that Omniweb quality feel ( ie. why is the address bar square and not round like in 4.5 and why are the icons so boring, they looked better before ). It looks less like Omniweb but more like Safari Pro, guess I'll just have to wait and see, a part from these minor annoyances it is looking really good, but bad for my wallet....

I have to agree with the loss of OmniWeb quality feel and that the toolbar icons in 4.5 were better (more consistant and less boring). I will try 5.0 and maybe upgrade but I am not sure of that.

[Rickster]

See this post for tab-title issues.

We "invented" the rounded text field on Mac OS X -- three years ago, we were using a standard "combo box" control for the popup-menu part of our address field, which became a problem when we made the background for the location bar be Aqua-style, so I proposed making the ends rounded and insetting the popup menu and URL-drag controls within the rounded areas. But things have changed since then: Apple has adopted the rounded text field and designated it to be exclusively for search fields, and we started using websites' "favicons" instead of a generic URL icon. We think it's important for a user interface to be standardized, and some favicons don't fit into a rounded space very well. Also, we got rid of the popup menu (don't worry the same functionality exists elsewhere), so the original reason for having rounded corners has gone away.

[iOliverC]

Originally posted by Rickster:
Apple has adopted the rounded text field and designated it to be exclusively for search fields

Isn't that what NSSearchField is for?

[markphip]

I was looking at the screenshots on ThinkSecret.com and have a question about the new Site Preferences feature.

My corporate email only works properly if I set the browser to say it is IE 5.2. For other reasons, IE itself doesn't even work with it, so OmniWeb is actually my only browser that works correctly. It would be nice if I could set this preference just for that site so that I could let all other sites know that I am using OmniWeb. Is this possible?

The ThinkSecret screenshots did not look like this would be included in the site preferences.

Thanks

Mark

[neilw]

I for one will reserve judgment on the tabs implementation until I actually try it. While I'm not a fan of drawers in general, the extra functionality offered may work out OK. Can't tell until I try it.

Oh, and it's also fair to say that on widescreens, which are pretty common now, horizontal real estate is more available than vertical, so tabs-on-the-side might be OK.

Page Marking and Site Preferences, on the other hand, look *fantastic*. Page Marking addresses the limitations of Snapback (which is pretty useful even in its limited form). Site Preferences has the potential to fix a lot of Safari annoyances for me (e.g., the need to keep turning pop-up blocking on and off all the time.)

All in all, looks like a very nice piece of work. Could be the first browser that I'll pay money for.

[Krypton]

Originally posted by markphip:
I was looking at the screenshots on ThinkSecret.com and have a question about the new Site Preferences feature.

My corporate email only works properly if I set the browser to say it is IE 5.2. For other reasons, IE itself doesn't even work with it, so OmniWeb is actually my only browser that works correctly. It would be nice if I could set this preference just for that site so that I could let all other sites know that I am using OmniWeb. Is this possible?

The ThinkSecret screenshots did not look like this would be included in the site preferences.

Thanks

Mark

That is exactly how the preferences will work - you can set your corporate email site with specific prefs, to pretend to be IE 5 while all other sites will use your defaults (i.e. OmniWeb)

[markphip]

Originally posted by Krypton:
That is exactly how the preferences will work - you can set your corporate email site with specific prefs, to pretend to be IE 5 while all other sites will use your defaults (i.e. OmniWeb)

I agree that is how they will work, it is just that in the screen shots on ThinkSecret it looked like only a subset of the preferences were available. And none of the tabs they showed look like it would contain this setting. So I was just trying to confirm.

Mark

[markphip]

Originally posted by markphip:
I agree that is how they will work, it is just that in the screen shots on ThinkSecret it looked like only a subset of the preferences were available. And none of the tabs they showed look like it would contain this setting. So I was just trying to confirm.

Mark

I just looked at Omni's screen shot for this feature and see that what I was looking for is on the "General" tab.

Nevermind. I look forward to the release.

Mark

[MrBS]

Originally posted by neilw:
(e.g., the need to keep turning pop-up blocking on and off all the time.)

There are websites that use pop up windows (not opening a new window with javascript after a click) for something other than advertisements?

That's an odd choice... I bet half their webmaster email responses are to the effect of "Please don't immediately close the window as it spaws. There's real information there. Really." or "Please turn off any settings that makes the internet at large functional and allow unrequested popups in your browser."

Very odd design choice.

~BS

[Tim2 at Omni]

Originally posted by MrBS:
There are websites that use pop up windows (not opening a new window with javascript after a click) for something other than advertisements?

My friend just recently got out of the Navy. He showed me the webmail account they made him use -- when you clicked on a message, it would actually load a new page, which had a JavaScript window.open() which would pop up with the selected message.

Completely pointless.

[neilw]

It's Microsoft Outlook Web Access. Trying to send or reply to email won't work if pop-ups are turned off. Highly annoying in Safari...

[Edit: I was replying to MrBS. Dunno about the Navy thing mentioned above.]

[Stevos]

In relation to the popup windows -- yes, many sites do this, especially Flash sites.

In fact, Apple's WWDC DVD's use this method, with a big warning in the readme to turn off "Block Pop-up Windows".

Omniweb has a setting to only do it when you request it by click, right?

[ratlater]

Originally posted by Stevos:
Omniweb has a setting to only do it when you request it by click, right?

Yep.

-matt