[ratlater]

Originally posted by JKT:
He does have a point though about a sense of detachment from the source window - if it were possible, having the zoom box appear as a sheet instead of a separate window would be the ideal solution.

A sheet would entirely defeat the purpose of the zoom box. The idea is to have a separate resizable window to allow easy text entry. On my dual monitor setup I often drag the zoom box to a different window so I can see the website. A sheet would make it impossible to interact with the webpage. My only gripe about the zoom box is that it isn't 'Dock Aware'. If you open it when the text box is close to the Dock the bottom of the zoom box will be obscured by the Dock. It should always slide out above the Dock.

-matt

[JKT]

Originally posted by ratlater:
A sheet would entirely defeat the purpose of the zoom box. The idea is to have a separate resizable window to allow easy text entry. On my dual monitor setup I often drag the zoom box to a different window so I can see the website. A sheet would make it impossible to interact with the webpage. My only gripe about the zoom box is that it isn't 'Dock Aware'. If you open it when the text box is close to the Dock the bottom of the zoom box will be obscured by the Dock. It should always slide out above the Dock.

-matt

I was actually thinking of a dynamically resizable sheet (like open save dialogues are), but cpac and yourself raise a valid criticism of it blocking the page below. Guess there are no easy answers, huh

[ratlater]

Originally posted by JKT:
I was actually thinking of a dynamically resizable sheet (like open save dialogues are), but cpac and yourself raise a valid criticism of it blocking the page below. Guess there are no easy answers, huh

Maybe a tear-off page of some kind. When initially activated the zoom box would be attached to the page like a sheet. Then if the user wanted, they could tear the zoom box off and position it wherever they wanted.

-matt

[cpac]

Originally posted by ratlater:
Maybe a tear-off page of some kind. When initially activated the zoom box would be attached to the page like a sheet. Then if the user wanted, they could tear the zoom box off and position it wherever they wanted.

-matt

I suppose.

I think the initial criticism was that you can loose track of which window a text zoom box is associated with if you have a lot going at once. This is exactly the problem sheets are supposed to solve, but those are lousy for the reasons mentioned above.

Maybe the zoom box's appearance could be tied to the window and only be visible when that window is key? - it'd disappear like OmniGraffle's tool palettes when you activate another program, only this would happen on a per-window basis?

(and I still think transparency would be a huge bonus)

[Rickster]

Sharky K: could you elaborate? Ideally we'd like to make as many of our users happy as possible, but to do that we need concise feedback. What don't you like about it, do you see it as missing something, how would you prefer to see it change, etc.?

The continuing discussion (ratlater, cpac, JKT et al) pretty much nailed the question of why the zoomed editor is how it is: Standard ways of more closely associating it with the window would interfere with your freedom to use that window, or other browser windows, but keeping it totally separate makes it difficult to track where it came from if you've got several open. We'll quite likely revisit this for 5.0 -- various other features we're working on could tie in nicely to both improve the zoomed editor and solve these problems.

Oh, and the zoomed editor window popping up behind the dock should be taken care of in the next sneaky peek... just committed a fix.

fitter: i'm not seeing any difference between 4.5sp35 and Safari on the pages you pointed out. I didn't need to change the charset, either. Perhaps you should try resetting your character encoding preferences (in the Display pane) to the default?

[ratlater]

Originally posted by Rickster:
Oh, and the zoomed editor window popping up behind the dock should be taken care of in the next sneaky peek... just committed a fix.

WooHoo!...I'm doin' the happy dance.

thanks,
-matt

[Sharky K.]

Originally posted by Rickster:
Sharky K: could you elaborate? Ideally we'd like to make as many of our users happy as possible, but to do that we need concise feedback. What don't you like about it, do you see it as missing something, how would you prefer to see it change, etc.?

I can't really give a solution right away.. I think this problem needs some time. Altough I like solving User Interface problems.

I would properly made an OmniGraffle like pallet of it so it stays on top and allow just one open textarea window at all time.


littel note: Maybe there could be even an UBB or HTML action field like insert link, email, image or default smiles etc.. that you see below each areafield in forums.

[MrBS]

I'd like the zoomed window to have it's 'depth' always be the parent window+1, if that makes sense and is possible.

The only problems I ever have with the zoomed window is when I open it up, then go to a different app and then return to OW by clicking on the parent window (as opposed to the dock). This leaves the zoomed window behind the parent window, and it's kind of annoying.

It would be cool if bringing the parent window to the front brought the zoomed window to the front...er.

~BS
"Me flunk English? That's unpossible!"

[ratlater]

Originally posted by MrBS:
I'd like the zoomed window to have it's 'depth' always be the parent window+1, if that makes sense and is possible.

The only problems I ever have with the zoomed window is when I open it up, then go to a different app and then return to OW by clicking on the parent window (as opposed to the dock). This leaves the zoomed window behind the parent window, and it's kind of annoying.

It would be cool if bringing the parent window to the front brought the zoomed window to the front...er.

~BS
"Me flunk English? That's unpossible!"

Sounds like a good plan to me.

-matt

[fitter]

Originally posted by Rickster:
fitter: i'm not seeing any difference between 4.5sp35 and Safari on the pages you pointed out. I didn't need to change the charset, either. Perhaps you should try resetting your character encoding preferences (in the Display pane) to the default?

I've reset to default, and the problem persists. I took some snapshots of OW and Safari so you'd be able to compare what I'm seeing.

Neither Safari nor OmniWeb render http://www.pravda.ru correctly without setting the charset to KOI-8. What you get displayed otherwise contains cyrillic characters, but it's garbage, like looking at checksums: the individual characters are recognizable, but they don't form words. Here's what Safari and OmniWeb display using the default encoding:

Safari, default charset
OmniWeb, default charset

And here's the same page with the correct encoding:

Safari, KOI-8
OmniWeb, KOI-8

Notice that OmniWeb spaces the characters too far apart, almost as if extra space characters are inserted between each letter. In one of the earlier sneakypeeks (in the 20s, I think), this problem was much worse, so pronounced that the word "Tekhnologii" on the BBC's Russian site was displayed as "e kh n o l o g i i", the first letter disappearing off the left side of the window.

Not everything in the Safari rendering is perfect. The link to FOREXPR.RU is rendered correctly by default, and mangled when the charset is KOI-8; and the quotation marks used in Russian print (typically << and >> or ,, and " ) are turned into strange parallel bars, much like logical OR. However, the text is for the most part readable.

Hope this clears things up.

[Tim2 at Omni]

I know some of you are disappointed with 4.5's support for non-English languages. This is an area I would really like to improve on. However, our goals for 4.5 were to maintain feature parity with 4.2. Since 4.2 also had really flaky support for Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, and some other non-English character sets, it just hasn't been as high a priority for us as integrating this new rendering engine (WebCore).

We feel that we've come a long way toward accomplishing feature parity with 4.2. OmniWeb 5, on which we will soon be focusing a lot more attention (), will probably have the support you're looking for.

Before 4.5 goes final, I'll see if there's anything we can do to improve the international text situation. Stay tuned!

[Mike S.]

Thanks to the temporary removal of the 4.x license requirement I'm finally able to give this a try and I must say, it's really quite good!

I've always been a fan of OmniWeb but it was slow on complex pages and rendered many things wrong but so far 4.5 has been good and not a crash yet.

It seems to me that it's a bit slower than the latest Safari at layout and the handling of text intensive pages, however. (This is a FrankenMac 8600)

It could just be a perception issue having to do with what kind of status the two browser provide and when they choose to show the first parts of the page, etc..

One area where OW 4.5 appears to be considerably faster is the laying out of large quantities of images, say a Mac Desktops gallery with 100+ pictures in it. It just seems to throw them on screen really quick compared to other browsers.

OmniWeb 4.x is good with pictures as well now that I think about it.

I'll be sorry to see the "demo" expire on Friday but perhaps public beta will show up around that time?

[JKT]

4.5 public beta 1 is now available...

[Jerommeke]

At launch it gives a notice about something like a central index, and if I want to disable or delete it, which seems to remember me of how Omniweb behaves; alert messages are not functional, I have not the faintest idea what to do when such a message appears. Safari is of when the message appearsf.

However, I skipped it and I found it to be faster then earlier on, but pages like versiontracker are again very slow, much slower then Safari, for instance.

[Rickster]

On the Cyrillic investigations... we've found out why http://pravda.ru and others look fine in 4.5 on some Macs and have the terrible character spacing fitter reported on others. The ones where it works have the "Additional Fonts for Additional Languages" package installed -- this is an optional item in the Mac OS X installation which is not enabled by default. If you didn't install it when you installed 10.2, you can insert Install Disc 2 and double-click AdditionalFonts.pkg to install it.

We'll continue working on getting it to render right without the extra fonts, but you can use this method to make it readable in the meantime.

[TheIceMan]

OmniWeb is now my main browser! So pretty to stare at.

[cpac]

Originally posted by Jerommeke:
At launch it gives a notice about something like a central index, and if I want to disable or delete it, which seems to remember me of how Omniweb behaves; alert messages are not functional, I have not the faintest idea what to do when such a message appears. Safari is of when the message appearsf.

However, I skipped it and I found it to be faster then earlier on, but pages like versiontracker are again very slow, much slower then Safari, for instance.

Ok, first, it might be worth a quick read-through before you post. I'm sure you could make things more clear.

Second, the error dialog you got probably referred to the history index, not the "central" index, and it probably did so because of a prior crash of one sort or another. If you want, you can just delete the history-related files in ~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb

Third, just tried loading things, no perceptible load-time difference on VT between OW & Safari here - TiBook 500/512.

[Gul Banana]

Originally posted by Jerommeke:
Safari is of when the message appearsf.

Okay, you've got me really curious now: What on earth does this mean? Are you saying that Safari is not open when you opened Omniweb? Or that in Safari this sort of message would not appear? Is appearsf just a typo, or some acronym?

[King Bob On The Cob]

I CAN'T DECIDE!!!
Two excellent browsers...
OmniWeb - Remembers my settings (Like spelling) the Form Editor is a big plus, actually renders pages better in some cases, Actually follows the HIG
Safari - Tabs, Tab Groups, Apple keeps good update speed

Your breaking my balls here, OmniWeb looks so clean and nice (A big plus in my book), but lacks tabs. I never started using tabs until I used a folder with links to every Mac Rumor site I could find. Now I just can't live without them! Tab Groups are just so nice. and being able to open a new tab just so I can have a reference page within a few inches of mouse movement is nice. Snapback is also something I found myself using a lot.

[TheIceMan]

King Bob:
Yes, many of us have already told Omnigroup of our desire for tabs. 4.5 is really just 4.2 with Safari's webcore. OmniWeb 5.0 will have tabs or something very similar to it.

[Jerommeke]

Originally posted by Gul Banana:
Okay, you've got me really curious now: What on earth does this mean? Are you saying that Safari is not open when you opened Omniweb? Or that in Safari this sort of message would not appear? Is appearsf just a typo, or some acronym?

Safari is turned off when Omniweb is being opened

[Jerommeke]

Originally posted by cpac:
Ok, first, it might be worth a quick read-through before you post. I'm sure you could make things more clear.

Second, the error dialog you got probably referred to the history index, not the "central" index, and it probably did so because of a prior crash of one sort or another. If you want, you can just delete the history-related files in ~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb

Third, just tried loading things, no perceptible load-time difference on VT between OW & Safari here - TiBook 500/512.

Yep, that was the thing I got. However, to the average user, I think, 'a history index' says nothing, or at least I have not the faintest thing what to do: By pressing to save something in earlier versions of Omniweb, I deleted my selfgenerated start page, so I am kinda curious.

The difference is huge here, but it can have to do with the G3 inside my machine, on which Safari performs better.

[JKT]

Originally posted by Jerommeke:
The difference is huge here, but it can have to do with the G3 inside my machine, on which Safari performs better.

You will find that OW loads some pages faster, some slower and many much the same speed. Although they both use WebCore the rendering engines are not identical (e.g. text is rendered differently, images are rendered differently, etc). From Rickster in another thread:

"The only parts of Safari we use are WebCore/KHTML and JavaScriptCore. In other words, we share the same engines for HTML parsing, page layout, JS execution, DOM modeling and dynamic HTML behaviors.

The rest of OmniWeb 4.5 is all our own code, much of which is exactly the same as in 4.2 and earlier. Text sometimes looks a little different because WebCore isn't responsible for drawing text, just placing blocks -- the host application (Safari or OmniWeb) is responsible for rendering the text. Benchmarks which depend on the browser's ability to juggle multiple tasks (like loading a page with lots of images) perform better in OmniWeb because we use the same high-performance multithreaded architecture as our earlier releases for networking and image processing.

Our HTTP and HTTPS implementations are also different from Safari's, as are parts of our cookie management and plugin/java hosting code... any of these could lead to a complex site like an online banking web-app working in one browser but not the other."

[Spliff]

The latest public beta has the same problems with Hotmail that Safari does. Is this a webcore issue? Whatever the case, it's frickin' annoying.

I can log into Hotmail and read my mail, but if I reply to a message, the send and cancel buttons become unresponsive. Essentially, I can read my Hotmail but I can't reply to a Hotmail message or compose a new one.

[cpac]

So are we done with 4.5 sps at this point? Down to an only-beta program? (4.5 final by WWDC?)

[ratlater]

Originally posted by cpac:
So are we done with 4.5 sps at this point? Down to an only-beta program? (4.5 final by WWDC?)

Probably done with the sps I'm guessing. There might be a couple more in between betas. I'm guessing the OG guys are going to wait for the next Safari release to grab a new webcore before declaring 4.5 final. Hopefully there busy little fingers are tapping away at 5.0 code now

-matt

[Sharky K.]

I still use Safari because of the better scrolling...

[cpac]

Originally posted by Sharky K.:
I still use Safari because of the better scrolling...

I never saw a reply to my question above re: scrolling - what is it that is so bad?

Is it jerky? or?

And how do you scroll? Keyboard arrows? spacebar? page-down/up? dragging the scroll bar? clicking on the scroll arrows?

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by Sharky K.:
I still use Safari because of the better scrolling...

Funky, that's why I use Omniweb...

[Sharky K.]

Originally posted by cpac:
I never saw a reply to my question above re: scrolling - what is it that is so bad?

Is it jerky? or?

And how do you scroll? Keyboard arrows? spacebar? page-down/up? dragging the scroll bar? clicking on the scroll arrows?

jerky yes... with mouse scroll button

[cpac]

Originally posted by Sharky K.:
jerky yes... with mouse scroll button

what do you mean a mouse scroll button? using the moust to click on the scroll bar button? or using a mouse scroll wheel? or using some other button on the mouse that is just supposed to scroll?

I'm just wondering because if the button is set to be the equivalent of a down-arrow or something, you may get bad scrolling because of keyboard repeat rates, etc, rather than because OW is slow or anything

[ambush]

Safari has like a smooth scrolling whereas OmniWeb has unsmooth scrolling. Not sure how I can explain it.

I use my mouse's scroll wheel btw

[Sharky K.]

Originally posted by cpac:
what do you mean a mouse scroll button? using the moust to click on the scroll bar button? or using a mouse scroll wheel? or using some other button on the mouse that is just supposed to scroll?

I'm just wondering because if the button is set to be the equivalent of a down-arrow or something, you may get bad scrolling because of keyboard repeat rates, etc, rather than because OW is slow or anything

Scroll wheel

[cpac]

Ok, I've tried it with my own scroll wheel mouse and I see what you're saying - but I think the "jerkiness" is just because OW interprets each click of the scroll wheel as being a larger number of pixels than Safari does.

I for one, prefer the larger as scrolling through a long page in Safari takes too long.

Maybe this could be set as a preference though?

[Guy Incognito 2]

Originally posted by cpac:

I for one, prefer the larger as scrolling through a long page in Safari takes too long.

But, but, scrolling through short pages happens too fast.

I think scroll wheels were invented so you could gently scroll through a window while, for example, reading text... without having to shift your attention to the scrollbar.

If you're gonna scroll through a 'long page in Safari', use the scrollbar, page up/down or home/end. Don't use a method that wasn't intended to be used the way you're using it.

[gregomni]

Sounds like maybe we should be doing some acceleration. The first couple scrollwheel 'clicks' scroll less, then larger and larger scrolls for each 'click' thereafter...

[Guy Incognito 2]

Originally posted by gregomni:
Sounds like maybe we should be doing some acceleration. The first couple scrollwheel 'clicks' scroll less, then larger and larger scrolls for each 'click' thereafter...

Didn't you guys have scrollwheel acceleration at one point?

[cpac]

ok, so maybe we'd all be happy with accelerated scroll, but starting with a smaller pixel jump than there is currently...

[ratlater]

I'd dig some accelerated scrolling action. Plus it could always be turned off somehow in prefs.

-matt

[ratlater]

WooHoo!! The SPs live. 36 can be found in the usual place with a long list of fixes.

-matt

[BZ]

Back to the SPs. Using SP36 right now.

Can't wait for the final so we can all start waiting again for SP1 of OW5.

BZ

[ambush]

*shock horror*

I want my little "work in progress" SP icon back!

[Giano]

One question....there's a way to fix a window size? everytime that i open Omni the window don't get the same precedent size, every time i open a window behind it resize...it's a bit boring...
any help?

[cpac]

Originally posted by Giano:
One question....there's a way to fix a window size? everytime that i open Omni the window don't get the same precedent size, every time i open a window behind it resize...it's a bit boring...
any help?

Browser menu, "save browser size"

[Giano]

Originally posted by cpac:
Browser menu, "save browser size"

uhm...i'm really blind
sorry for the stupid question...
i'm falling in love with OmniWeb again...yes it have not tabs....but....im waiting

[cpac]

Originally posted by Giano:
yes it have not tabs....but....im waiting...

...for 5.0.

I wouldn't be shocked if there were 5.0 sp's before the year's end.

[workerbee]

Originally posted by cpac:
ok, so maybe we'd all be happy with accelerated scroll, but starting with a smaller pixel jump than there is currently...

Just do it like Mozilla Firebird.

[Powaqqatsi]

Originally posted by cpac:
...for 5.0.

I wouldn't be shocked if there were 5.0 sp's before the year's end.

Well, afterall we've been waiting for years for them to come.

[gregomni]

Originally posted by cpac:
...for 5.0.

I wouldn't be shocked if there were 5.0 sp's before the year's end.

I hope this isn't like discussing future plans and dates and stuff, which we aren't supposed to do, but I would be shocked, stunned, shaken to my very CORE, if there were NOT 5.0 sp's well before year's end.

[ambush]

Originally posted by gregomni:
I hope this isn't like discussing future plans and dates and stuff, which we aren't supposed to do, but I would be shocked, stunned, shaken to my very CORE, if there were NOT 5.0 sp's well before year's end.

ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh