[ctbritt]

OW 5.0 final is out.

[melman101]

how does everyone like it? so far, its pretty good. and i love graphical tabs

[pliny]

OW 5 works very well, it is my default browser.

I like the saved browsing feature.

I would like for it to be able to automatically save web pages without needing to add an htm extension, though.

Another nice feature I like is the save to pdf by just pressing option. OW has all sorts of these Mac OS touches that make it a pleasure to use.

The OW 5 packaging looks pretty spiffy.

[nooon]

Is it still slow like hell?

[melman101]

Actually it seems pretty responsive to me. It seems snappier to me than safari. I liked safari's brushed metal theme, but im really starting to like omniweb. For the time being, i'll keep using it

[legacyb4]

Saw the release notes and love the concept of saved workspaces; in a word though, is it worth the price?

"Worth" of course, being defined by the fact that you do get Safari for free on your Mac...

Thanks.

[Jowy]

I tried it out, but it's ad blocking feature didn't really appeal to me. Specifically how to block flash ads. I couldn't find it short of actually clicking on the ad and getting the URL that way. Is there a simpler way?

[MindFad]

Tried it out. While I like the browser as a whole, I don't like the take on tabs. I also don't like the $29.99 price tag. I think I'll stick with Safari, but it is a nice browser.

[Powaqqatsi]

Originally posted by nooon:
Is it still slow like hell?

It's pretty fast but, the tab implementation sucks and I'm never going to pay for a browser.

[melman101]

yeah I'm back to safari. Safari just seems snappier to me. sorry, im going back on my previous post :-)

[Fonzie]

I bought is a while back but has not really been using it. This new release does not even have spiffy buttons , just the plain old ones. Not that i'm complaining. Well, maybe I am

Anyways, one feature I would like to see in OmniWeb is this: Dated download folders, like Shiira has. This is one thing I really like about Shiira and miss in Safari and OmniWeb5.

[mac15]

Just plain awesome! Its the same speed as safari for me and the RSS feature is awesome

[JKT]

Originally posted by Jowy:
I tried it out, but it's ad blocking feature didn't really appeal to me. Specifically how to block flash ads. I couldn't find it short of actually clicking on the ad and getting the URL that way. Is there a simpler way?

Go to Preferences>Ad Blocking
Click the Edit Blocked URLs List... button.
Click the + button below the "Don't load anything from sites matching these expressions:" box.
Replace the "some\.ad\.com" text that is displayed with:

/.*\.swf

This will block pretty much all flash content and leave a placeholder on the page instead. If you want to view the content, simply click the placeholder and it will load and be added to your "white list" (will load regardless of your other ad blocking settings).

[Le Flaneur]

Originally posted by melman101:
yeah I'm back to safari. Safari just seems snappier to me. sorry, im going back on my previous post :-)

I agree. Safari loads pages more quickly. Will OW load pages as quickly once OmniGroup updates to the latest version of WebCore?

[entrox]

Originally posted by Le Flaneur:
Will OW load pages as quickly once OmniGroup updates to the latest version of WebCore?

Yes.

[voyageur]

What I like:
--Prints faster than Safari, formats pages nicely.
--Automatically checks specified websites for changes.
--Button to open a new email and send a URL to someone.

What I don't like:
--Loads pages slower than Safari.

[Boondoggle]

I LOVE most of the features in Omniweb. I don't like the look. The Favorites Bar is BUTT-UGLY compared to the Safari implementation, and the buttons are too 90's for me.

I also feel the bookmarks could be laid out a bit better. I had some trouble figuring out how to get my imported Safari books to display in the Bookmark Menu. Personal Bookmarks appears to mean bookmark menu. I think.

There are a few things that I don't understand. Since OW uses webCore, I expected pages to display exactly like Safari, but they don't. I also expected logging in to USBank online banking to fail like Safari, but it works in OW.

bd

[JKT]

OmniGroup are going to be releasing a theme switcher for OW5 (I don't know much about it, but I believe it is for loading different button icons etc).

OW currently uses the same Webcore as Safari version 1.0 which is part of the reason why it is a different speed than the latest Safari 1.2.x, but not the whole reason - don't forget that they use a different caching mechanism as well as other under-the-hood changes (which is also one reason why OW can work with some sites where Safari doesn't and vice versa). OmniWeb is also more highly threaded than Safari which can make it faster (especially on dual processor macs). FWIW, OW 5.1 which will be released in due course will include an updated engine based on the currently released Webcore which should improve OW rendering speed to be on a par with Safari - maybe better, maybe slightly worse, maybe the same.

[Boondoggle]

Originally posted by JKT:
OmniGroup are going to be releasing a theme switcher for OW5 (I don't know much about it, but I believe it is for loading different button icons etc).

OW currently uses the same Webcore as Safari version 1.0 which is part of the reason why it is a different speed than the latest Safari 1.2.x, but not the whole reason - don't forget that they use a different caching mechanism as well as other under-the-hood changes (which is also one reason why OW can work with some sites where Safari doesn't and vice versa). OmniWeb is also more highly threaded than Safari which can make it faster (especially on dual processor macs). FWIW, OW 5.1 which will be released in due course will include an updated engine based on the currently released Webcore which should improve OW rendering speed to be on a par with Safari - maybe better, maybe slightly worse, maybe the same.

Thanks, that is hopeful.

Does anyone know if there is some intrinsic reason why one can't have a text only toolbar AND and address field? I mean, it is just text after all. Same with the Google field.

thanks.

[Le Flaneur]

I've got to say that I don't understand how bookmarks work in OW5 at all. I imported my Safari bookmarks, and then dragged all the folders below the divider in the bookmark window. But they can't be edited there, nor does "add bookmark" give me the ability to deposit a bookmark into one of these folders.

Obviously, I'm supposing that OW works like Safari, which isn't the case , but I don't understand why Omni Development didn't implement bookmarks like safari while adding "shared bookmarks," "most visited," "unviewed content," etc.

In addition, one thing I love about Safari's bookmarks page is that you can switch between a displayed web page and the bookmarks page even when offline (assuming that the displayed web page doesn't need to be refreshed). I tried this with OW5, and it wanted to reload a very simple page, and so I lost its contents because I was offline!

[Boondoggle]

There is more bookmark/interface weirdness. I like having favorites, but not the favorites bar (mainly because it is ugly). When I turned off the favorites bar on my Powerbook, I automagically got a favorites item in the Bookmark menu which I thought was cool.

On my iMac however, I don't see the menu item. I can't find any way to turn it on.

Also, with the location bar turned off, I still get a location bar with a new window.



There seem to be a lot of bugs in the interface.

[ambush]

Been using RCs and Final for like a coupl'o'weeks or so...

my comments:

Feeds kick butt
Ad blocking kicks


Switching tabs is painful, slow...
No Flash ad blocking (WTF, "I grew 3 inches with HEIGHT MAX AND I'M STILL GROWING" I DON'T ****ING CARE **** FACE!)

[1800-whatever]

love it , buying the upgrade.

[F_Elz]

OW5 is browser heaven.

[Spirit_VW]

I bought it, and I love ALMOST everything about it. Love the tabs, love the features, etc.

However, I will *not* be using it as my default browser until they fix one glaring issue that makes it unusable for me - the cache. I am still on dialup, and OW's cache is totally useless. It doesn't seem to do anything. I find it constantly reloading images it just got done loading one page before, which *dramatically* slows down browsing. Safari has no such problem - it is a huge speed difference. I mean, I can load a page that's in a series of pages, using common graphics, and click "next" - to see it re-loading nearly every image it just loaded on the preceding page. Safari doesn't do this.

I just adore the browser and the OmniGroup has done a truly amazing job on OW5, but I just can't use it until the cache is fixed (or perhaps one day the phone company or cable company will let us have broadband...)

[Luca Rescigno]

BTW, OmniWeb 5.0 uses an old version of WebCore from Safari, so that's why it's not displaying things the same. It uses v85, while Safari uses v120-something (not at my Mac to check). Apparently they're going to implement a newer version of it, eventually.

For me? Not worth the money. In fact, I don't find it good enough to use as my full time browser even if it were free. Yes, it's beautiful... but it's not that fast, the graphical tabs are not really my favorite thing, and there are too many disadvantages to be worth paying money for it. I use Firefox for my browsing needs and I will continue to do so for the time being.

[Tim2 at Omni]

Originally posted by Spirit_VW:
I just adore the browser and the OmniGroup has done a truly amazing job on OW5, but I just can't use it until the cache is fixed (or perhaps one day the phone company or cable company will let us have broadband...)

We're aware that our cache could be better, and we're going to work on it. It is better than previous versions of OmniWeb, though, especially across launches (OmniWeb pre-5.0 did not have a persistenet cache).

[Le Flaneur]

The help says:

"Move windows between workspaces by dragging them from the right hand side of the window into a workspace on the left hand side."

I cannot get this to work at all! Anyone else?

[Gavin]

Here's my review and comparison. It started out as a couple of notes but got away from me ;-)


I haven't used Omniweb since Safari came out. Earlier maybe, because it couldn't keep up on certain websites so I was stuck using IE to my horror. I was very impressed by their great interface and attention to detail.

Main surprise: it logged me in to this forum. So it grabbed the cookies from safari?
Don't know if that's good or bad.

Cookie management has better control. It is fine grained rather than the simple options in S. Also has a better layout for showing the cookies and their contents which is important for development. You can even get a list of the cookies the current page/site has set.

this thing has lots of goodies you need for building and debugging web sites.

error log, javascript console and having a real source editor rocks!


Performance wise, it doesn't seem to choke when opening several long pages in multiple tabs. I can move between tabs and read and scroll pages as they load. when I do this this in S it will just freeze until the new pages load.

wheel scrolling is smoother than S - S is jumpy for me.

I don't find it any slower than safari as some people have said

The pages look exactly the same as safari - no surprise. Download manager seems about the same too.

The little details:

Toolbar is nice and tight, stays out of your way like S - Omni had it first I believe. OW toolbar has a lot more options than S. I like that the stop and reload buttons are separate - S is too minimalist in that regard, I always seem to reload a stubborn page when I click to stop it.

There is no 'home' page button. There is a 'start' page button, which is a better term for it, but it's not on by default. good. This is one of those attention to details things that is the hallmark of a good Mac developer. Shows why Mac apps are just plain better, people really think the whole interface through.


The thumbnail pix in tabs are cool. It's a little hard to get used to them on the side.
I put the tab drawer on the right next to the scroll bar and that makes it a lot more usable for me.


ad blocking already paying off - annoying animated flash crap at cnn - GONE!

Multiple form fill sets - cool. I'll never use it, but cool.

Multiple search sites thing is cool, defaults to google but you can search any site.


OW5 is more sophisticated than Safari but is just about as easy to use. It has everything that Safari has (as far as I can tell) plus many tools for site developers and much more control over the whole surfing experience.

So, if you just do some surfing S is great but if you are in the power user camp you'll probably want to drop the $30 for OW5.


As a caveat, I've only been using it for an hour. It usually takes me a couple of days to really find the stuff that bugs me.

I can't compare it to firefox, don't use it. The way firefox closes tabs was a deal breaker for me, you actually have to open the tab to close the tab - lame. It is slow moving between tabs. It is slow to start up. It is slow to register a wheel scroll. It may be fast at page rendering but the fact that I can watch it paint the context menus line by line brings to mind the term 'so what?'. The funny thing is that I do use it by choice in Linux, weird. Everything's relative.

[Mike S.]

If you guys can create a wicked efficient and fast disk cache you'd be golden.

In my little browser benchmarks I was surprised by Opera because in the course of the testing I discovered that the "world's fastest browser" actually rendered web sites quite slowly in runs where it's cache was emptied but in the runs where the pages were cached the thing rendered nearly as fast as Camino with an empty cache (which is still fastest).

A high speed disk cache can do wonders for performance, the OW 5.0 cache doesn't seem to have a negligible impact on performance, in some cases it actually makes things a little slower (on two different machines).

I notice the same thing with iCab, it can take longer to get data from cache than the high speed connection.

Opera, by far, has the most powerful cache so that's the benchmark to shoot for, IMO. If you can equal them I think the performance feedback would go bye-bye.

I wonder if there are any open sourced high speed, low resource databases one could incorporate for a cache system? Perhaps Tiger's Spotlight back end can be usurped for browser cache purposes? Quicksilver's DB seems very quick though I imagine coding up a fast find is a whole different beast then coding up something as heavily read and written to as a browser cache.

I'm loving 5.0 so don't let what is intended as constructive criticism let you think otherwise; good job on all your hard work Omni Devs!

[GeeYouEye]

Originally posted by Boondoggle:
Thanks, that is hopeful.

Does anyone know if there is some intrinsic reason why one can't have a text only toolbar AND and address field? I mean, it is just text after all. Same with the Google field.

thanks.

While there's nothing you can do about the Search field there (although personally I find it faster to just type the shortcut in the address field ie "google search term" or "vt {my shortcut for versiontracker} omniweb") remove the address bar item from the toolbar and hit cmnd-option-N, or View>Toolbars>Navigation Bar.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by entrox:
Yes.

Uhm, I'm sorry, but that is not a known. It is a known unknown.

[Mac Guru]

I imported all of my bookmarks from Safari but does ANYONE know where or HOW one can move the bookmarks menu bookmarks? I have some I want to move into the subfolders but in the Bookmarks Window, NOTHING that's in my Bookmarks Menu, is in the window. VERY annoying.

Mac Guru

[cpac]

what's in your bookmarks menu should be your "personal bookmarks" - if you click on that on the left hand side, you should see everything that's in your menu....

[Mac Guru]

There is no Personal Bookmarks area... this is all I have available to me...

Address Book
History
Local Web Servers
Most Visited
Shared Bookmarks
Site Preferences
Unreachable
Unviewed Content

That's IT. So I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

[cpac]

Originally posted by Mac Guru:
Address Book
History
Local Web Servers
Most Visited
Shared Bookmarks
Site Preferences
Unreachable
Unviewed Content

Ok - well in addition you should have "Favorites" (equivalent to the bookmark bar), and "Personal Bookmarks" as well as "My Shared Bookmarks" and "Local Web Servers"

My guess is that your collections file is messed up somehow. Try quitting OW, deleting or moving all the groups.plist files in the OW support folder and relaunching OW to see if you don't get those things back...

[Mac Guru]

Originally posted by cpac:
Ok - well in addition you should have "Favorites" (equivalent to the bookmark bar), and "Personal Bookmarks" as well as "My Shared Bookmarks" and "Local Web Servers"

My guess is that your collections file is messed up somehow. Try quitting OW, deleting or moving all the groups.plist files in the OW support folder and relaunching OW to see if you don't get those things back...

That did it! Thanks!

Mac Guru

[sideus]

I'm having trouble understanding this whole regex stuff for the adblocking. Say there is a webpage with ads coming from adserver.com. Why can't I put into OW ad blocking list "adserver.com" and all ads coming from adserver.com (be it from zul.adserver.com or whatever.adserver.com) be blocked?

Someone point me into the right direction...

[mac15]

One annoying thing, I'd want no page to load up when I make a new tab. Having Apple.com (my homepage) show up all the time is annoying

[Tim2 at Omni]

Originally posted by mac15:
One annoying thing, I'd want no page to load up when I make a new tab. Having Apple.com (my homepage) show up all the time is annoying

You can set your start page in the preferences (OmniWeb -> Preferences), under "General". You'd probably want to choose "Empty".
Hope that helps!

[cpac]

Originally posted by sideus:
I'm having trouble understanding this whole regex stuff for the adblocking. Say there is a webpage with ads coming from adserver.com. Why can't I put into OW ad blocking list "adserver.com" and all ads coming from adserver.com (be it from zul.adserver.com or whatever.adserver.com) be blocked?

Someone point me into the right direction...

You can - you just need to use the right language so type: .*adserver.* to block all URLs that include "adserver"

The best way I've found to block things with OW's new contextual menu + ad list is to find a site with an ad you want to block, use the contextual menu to filter the image, then go to the blocked URL list and find the whole URL. - find the part you think is common to the ads, and then put ".*" (without the quotes) before and after the part you think refers to all the ads generally - this will usually result in very good blocked results.

examples:

.*doubleclick.*
.*adserver.*
.*valueserver.*
.*fastclick.*

&c....

[neoTony]

Yeah, but what is up with teh suck design of the icons on the omniweb homepage?

[cpac]

Originally posted by neoTony:
Yeah, but what is up with teh suck design of the icons on the omniweb homepage?

eh? you mean the big globe on the start page? Or the icons on the right of the actual omniweb webpage? (those are just big versions of the tiny icons that appear in the status bar....)

Or are you just wanting to bash OW 5 and couldn't think of something better?

[Graymalkin]

What I really like about OW5 is the little enhancements it has over Safari. OW5 gives you much tighter control over how everything is going to work and be rendered, the sort of control you wish Safari had. I really like the ability to use regex to block content from particular sites and the ability to finely control the display of animated GIFs and particular JavaScript actions. One thing Camino has over Safari is the ability to block JavaScript window reordering and resizes without having to entirely disable JavaScript which breaks a ridiculous number of sites. OW5's ability to block these same JavaScript functions is very welcome. Even though it is such a minor feature I really love the form editor. The ability to import text from local files and append them is extremely useful and a sweet feature. It's something I wouldn't have thought of myself but it seems so obvious now that I have seen it.

I'm not too pleased to see OW5 using an older version of WebCore than is currently available to Safari. There's been a lot of much needed improvements in WC in the past few revisions and OW will benefit greatly from them I think. I'm also not terribly fond of the RSS reader though I do think it is a good idea. The RSS reader implemented in Safari 2.0 is much better in my opinion, I prefer the XSL transformed feeds rather than the parsed feeds stuck inside of widgets because they're much easier to read. The caching is also problematic and I'm on a broadband connection. Bandwidth I don't need to reload images is bandwidth I can use for other things and bandwidth a site doesn't need to send me those images is bandwidth it can use to send me truly dynamic content. Ergo good caching is good on both ends of the spectrum.

All in all OW5's features make it a really nice browser. I'm giving it until the end of the trial period to make a big enough impression for me to fork over $30 for it. I don't have a problem paying for a useful bit of software but OW5 has stiff competition. Safari loaded with PithHelmet and an ad blocking stylesheet works pretty well for me and is essentially free. Omni doesn't seem to remember I licensed OW4 either so I'd have to pay a full $30 for OW5. There's also the issue of Safari 2.0 coming with Tiger, it is really speedy and handles RSS feeds very nicely. Though it isn't as tunable as OW5 it does provide the guys at Omni with pretty stiff competition. Hopefully they continue making OmniWeb awesome.

[JKT]

OW are already in the process of updating to the latest public version of WebCore for OW 5.1, I can guarantee that. As for your upgrading to 5 from 4.5, you should be able to contact OmniGroup to let them know that you already have a 4.5 licence but are having trouble getting the upgrade price (perhaps send them a copy of it which you'll find in /Library/Application Support/Omni Group/Software Licences) and they should sort it out for you.

[ambush]

Originally posted by neoTony:
Yeah, but what is up with teh suck design of the icons on the omniweb homepage?

Mike Matas left Omni.

[MrBS]

Originally posted by Gavin:
Main surprise: it logged me in to this forum. So it grabbed the cookies from safari?
Don't know if that's good or bad.

Not cookies, but it uses the keychain for storing passwords. Like Safari. So you only need to login and click 'save password' in one browser.

~BS

[MrBS]

Originally posted by ambush:
Mike Matas left Omni.

Eh. Seems like a talented guy, but I didn't like his changes to OW 5. He's the one responsible for the softer arrows and the backwards reload button. At least that's what it looks like.

I'd rather both those were fixed.

::eagerly awaits theme plugin::

~BS

[neoTony]

Originally posted by cpac:
eh? you mean the big globe on the start page? Or the icons on the right of the actual omniweb webpage? (those are just big versions of the tiny icons that appear in the status bar....)

Or are you just wanting to bash OW 5 and couldn't think of something better?

No, not wanting to bash the browser at all - when Omniweb uses a later webcore, I'll be ponying up my $30 too. I just wondered - all the other pages have beautiful full-colour icons throughout, yet the OW5 pages have these quite bland black and white icons.

I had heard Mikey Matas left Omni (I believe the shiny, shiny icon stylings were his), and wondered what this meant for future Omni UIs, s'all.

[cpac]

Originally posted by neoTony:
No, not wanting to bash the browser at all - when Omniweb uses a later webcore, I'll be ponying up my $30 too. I just wondered - all the other pages have beautiful full-colour icons throughout, yet the OW5 pages have these quite bland black and white icons.

I had heard Mikey Matas left Omni (I believe the shiny, shiny icon stylings were his), and wondered what this meant for future Omni UIs, s'all.

Ah - no worries. And I know they've been working on integrating the latest webcore for a while now - wouldn't expect it to be more than a couple months at most...