[Strategem]

Just saw that OmniWeb 4.1b1 was released Christmas Eve... http://www.omnigroup.com/ftp/pub/software/MacOSX/10.1/

[Sine]

Yes.. and it's DAMN fast.. mucho impressivo

[iBabo]

i using it now....i never thought id use omniweb..i had used it one before, and i hated it....but now.....i love it...its the best!

[iNeusch]

I am even thinking of buying it

[Jan Van Boghout]

It really rocks . If it has a few more features , I'll be glad to give 30$ . It's the best X browser ever

[juanvaldes]

119K of 3.7 megs. @ 207 bytes/sec...about 5 hours remaining.

Everyone and their mother is DLing it now...


just checked my version of OW. Turns out this is just SP20 with a new name. And I already had 20 silly me, should have look earlier...

[Amorya]

They removed the B key for pageup!

I use a Dvorak keyboard, and B is in the perfect place to be pageup when using spacebar for page down - I have a laptop with no pagedown (except using 2 hands), and taht was really useful.

[hypercool]

This new version is great! Amorya: Option-up arrow and down arrow do page up and down. Dvorak Rules! btw though, the B key was in almost the same place for qwerty users. Maybe Omni was thinking of us. Developers note, if you decide to make any other keyboard shortcuts like that in the future, dvorak users appreciate being considered

[ctt1wbw]

One of these days Omnigroup will make the cache behave the same way all the other browsers do. Then it will be as fast as the others, and then I will start using it. What's the point of using a web browser that starts off with a zeroized cache every time?

[MacAgent]

The cache doesn't work right on forums anymore. The Sneaky Peeks did, but the beta doesn't. It doesn't show the latest posts.

[Liquidity X]

the bet is a sneakypeak, 23 i think, all they did a delte the sneak peak buld number from the splash screen. just FYI I ROCKS!!!! now if they could get PHP to work a little better, and add some WMP support i'd buy.

[Amorya]

Originally posted by hypercool:
<STRONG>This new version is great! Amorya: Option-up arrow and down arrow do page up and down. Dvorak Rules! btw though, the B key was in almost the same place for qwerty users. Maybe Omni was thinking of us. Developers note, if you decide to make any other keyboard shortcuts like that in the future, dvorak users appreciate being considered</STRONG>

Thanks, I didn't know that! I'd been using FN-arrow all the time
Still prefer B, but can't have everything, I guess. To be honest, I'd nearly forgotten where B is on QWERTY... I use Dvorak nearly solely now. Gotta love Apple for letting Powerbook users re-arrange their keys just by taking the covers off each one *g*.

Amorya

[itistoday]

also, text seems to be more crisper and readable, unlike before it seemed a little blurry.

[KidRed]

Any of you guys get the link color to break up after clicking on links? If I click and move my mouse a little, the link color turns rainbow-ish.

Oh well, still rocks

[GatoVolador]

can't wait to get back to school ( University of Texas - Austin) to start downloading. on a side note, i would just like to comment on the omnigroup website...NICE!!!! 2 thumbs up for the sweet website design.

[Rickster]

They removed the B key for pageup!

Single-unmodified-letter-key shortcuts have been removed from the HTML view and lists like the bookmarks view because they've been replaced by "type-ahead" selection. Type the first few letters of a link to select it, then hit return to follow the link. And like files in the Finder, you can select bookmarks by typing the first few letters of a bookmark's label.

[iNeusch]

OK, I just got a license!

[Hash]

Man, this build ROCKS! Greatest browser for OSX!

[OreoCookie]

But they killed the window switching feature using �Apple' + 1 (which is very nifty, even one of the main reasons why I use OmniWeb -- it's all about ease of use).
But it sped up significantly.

P. S. I like the new icon.

[petej]

Window cycling via Command-backtick (key to the left of "1") is still there.

[iNeusch]

Originally posted by petej:
<STRONG>Window cycling via Command-backtick (key to the left of "1") is still there.</STRONG>

Nice!

Any other cool features?

[Jim Paradise]

Having been using the sneakypeek builds, this beta is pretty damn good.

However, Hotmail renders *horribly* compared to any other release and I'm not talking about speed... Looks like they'll have to fix up some compatibility issues before the final.

[iNeusch]

Originally posted by Jim Paradise:
<STRONG>Looks like they'll have to fix up some compatibility issues before the final.</STRONG>

It's only a b1!

[chris v]

I nabbed this build a couple days ago. There's one thing that really bugs me.

When you hit the "Increase Font Size" button, it reloads the whole page. iCab just increases the font size instantly.

Also, when you hit the "Back" button after incresing the font size, it takes you back to the same page with the smaller font, instead of the previous page.

Also, (okay, 2 things) WHY don't any browsers besides iCab have a "Stop Animations" feature? So many commercial websites have annoying dancing ads, and iCab is the only browser I can stand to look at them in.

Other than that, Omniweb now launches fast, and browses as fast as anything out there. Pretty nice, really.

CV

[Sine]

Originally posted by chris v:
<STRONG>Also, (okay, 2 things) WHY don't any browsers besides iCab have a "Stop Animations" feature? So many commercial websites have annoying dancing ads, and iCab is the only browser I can stand to look at them in.
CV</STRONG>

Go in the image preferences in Omniweb. It has options to either play no animations, play only a certain amount of time or play continuously.

[Spheric Harlot]

Originally posted by Sine:
<STRONG>

Go in the image preferences in Omniweb. It has options to either play no animations, play only a certain amount of time or play continuously.</STRONG>

Even better:

It lets you BLOCK Ads!

[RAILhead]

OmniWeb is great, but they STILL auto-replace the font Verdana with Arial, and that totally sucks. Give me option to allow for this as a PREFERENCE, but don't code the browser to do this without "getting permission" from the user.

I read (from their mailing list) they did this to make MSNBC's site look good, which is a stupid reason IMHO, and this font replacement totally screws any sites that are based on the Verdana font (like mine).

One of the sneaky-peeks a few builds back would display Verdana as it should, and I got my hopes up only to have them dashed again by Ken deciding for me that Verdana wasn't a font I should use.

Am I the only person that thinks auto-replacing fonts like this is stupid?

Maury

[iNeusch]

Originally posted by RAILhead:
<STRONG>Am I the only person that thinks auto-replacing fonts like this is stupid?</STRONG>

No

Never realized that that was going on, but now you say it, it explains many things/bugs I have encountered in various website
Is there a way to turn it off?

Anyway, OmniWeb is still as good, I keep it as my default OS (especially now I have bought it!)

[bernt]

I can't understand you guys that think OmniWeb is fast. It *is* fast when it comes to page rendering, but it is *incredibly* slow when it comes to scrolling and when you are surfing with multiple windows. Explorer is *way* faster regarding those two issues.

When I scroll with my scroll-wheel mouse in some pages, OmniWeb responds a second or two after I scrolled - that is not tolerable at all!

So Explorer will still be my default browser until OmniWeb speeds up its UI.

Btw, this is on an iBook 600, 384mb ram.

bernt

[MusicMan]

I believe Ken said in another thread that the problem was due to a line spacing issue. Apparently Verdana would be oddly spaced if he did use it, because IE and Netscape just pull the font height property from the font and not the actual line spacing property. OmniWeb is doing it right, but for now, Verdana looks Screwy, so he substituted Arial in the meantime so as to be helpful.

As for OmniWeb's speed, I believe the problem here is Cocoa...Ken has made amazing strides in what he can control. But Apple needs to address the Quartz speed issues before this is gonna get fixed, I think.

[ 12-27-2001: Message edited by: MusicMan ]

[RAILhead]

I'll have to disagree with Ken on that one, as my site (and other Verdana-based sites) looks spectacular when OW *did* render using Verdana. There were NO spacing/line-height issues at all on my site or any of the others I visited.

The fact of the matter is, when OW used Verdana my site looked great. Thanks to Ken, my site looks like crap when using OW.

Maury

[TheTraveller]

Originally posted by bernt:
<STRONG>I can't understand you guys that think OmniWeb is fast. It *is* fast when it comes to page rendering, but it is *incredibly* slow when it comes to scrolling
bernt</STRONG>

Well, I'm running SP20, and scrolling is remarkably fast. I don't have a scroll wheel, I just use the arrow keys. Also, I set my key repeat rate to "fastest" - but now when I scroll, it scrolls very acceptably. Running OS 10.1.2 on a G3/500 with 384 MB RAM.

[Rickster]

WHY don't any browsers besides iCab have a "Stop Animations" feature?

Control/right-click in an empty part of a web page, and the context menu will have an item for stopping all animations on the page. We'd been meaning to put that in a more useful place (or two), but it didn't happen in time for UI freeze.

OmniWeb is great, but they STILL auto-replace the font Verdana with Arial, and that totally sucks.

Indeed it does. I like Verdana myself. However, some web authors have chosen to make the integrity of their page layouts depend on the (incorrect) line height metrics Explorer reads from the font -- use the correct metrics, or another font that has similar metrics to what Verdana is supposed to be, and the layout of the pages will be totally messed up. And some of these pages are quite popular. When we released 4.0, we received hundreds, perhaps thousands of complaints about msnbc.com and other sites which have this problem. The best temporary solutionwe could find for satisfying these customers was not using Verdana, and we shippped 4.0.1 with this font substitution hardcoded.

In 4.1, we moved font substitutions to the preferences system, but didn't have time to add a user interface for it. However, with the <font face = "courier">defaults</font> command-line tool or by editing the com.omnigroup.OmniWeb.plist file while OmniWeb is closed, you can customize the font substitution settings. Just add a dictionary for the key <font face = "courier">OHFontFamilySubstitutions</font>. Leave it empty to turn font substitution off, or add your own entries: the font to replace on the left, the font to replace it with on the right. For example I find that Lucida Grande is a nice substitute for Geneva, so I've turned that on in my account.

As for speed: the biggest bottleneck right now is page layout. Partially that's because our architecture for such could do to be improved, and partially because so much of it depends on thread-unsafe Apple code. In other words, we can't use multithreading to its full potential because a lot of the layout code and the UI code has to run in the same thread. We're already working on a new architecture that should resolve both problems (as well as allow more CSS2 etc. compatibility) for 5.0.

[RAILhead]

Indeed it does. I like Verdana myself. However, some web authors have chosen to make the integrity of their page layouts depend on the (incorrect) line height metrics Explorer reads from the font -- use the correct metrics, or another font that has similar metrics to what Verdana is supposed to be, and the layout of the pages will be totally messed up. And some of these pages are quite popular. When we released 4.0, we received hundreds, perhaps thousands of complaints about msnbc.com and other sites which have this problem. The best temporary solutionwe could find for satisfying these customers was not using Verdana, and we shippped 4.0.1 with this font substitution hardcoded.

Though I appreciate the response, Ric, that's no justification for auto-substituting the font. If I want my site to be displayed with 24-point Zapf Dingbats -- so help me, as the designer of my site, I expect my site to look the way I designed it.

Simple.

It's not up to you or anyone else at the OmniGroup. YOU aren't the site's designers, therefore you (OmniGroup) have no right to interject your opinion regarding my font choice. And that's what you're giving: your opinion regarding which type faces will be displayed and which will not. Again, that decision isn't up to you to set globally for all users -- it's up to the site designer first, and then it's up to the user to set in their personal browser preferences.

In 4.1, we moved font substitutions to the preferences system, but didn't have time to add a user interface for it. However, with the defaults command-line tool or by editing the com.omnigroup.OmniWeb.plist file while OmniWeb is closed, you can customize the font substitution settings. Just add a dictionary for the key OHFontFamilySubstitutions. Leave it empty to turn font substitution off, or add your own entries: the font to replace on the left, the font to replace it with on the right. For example I find that Lucida Grande is a nice substitute for Geneva, so I've turned that on in my account.

I'll give you the shadow of a doubt and take this to mean you WILL be adding a "user interface" to the no-Verdana-allowed font substitution? If so, that would be great -- and if you do this, I would also expect OmniGroup to make it painfully obvious to ALL users that this specific auto-substitution is being practiced so they can stop it (or leave it, if they choose).

Other than that, to expect casual users to muck around with the plist is crazy, as most people (if you keep auto-replacing Verdana) won't know how to do this, and they won't (probably) even know they can. All they'll know is that sites that used to look "good" -- even with IE -- now look "bad" with OmniWeb.

When those situations arise, would that I could, I'd take the blame for my site rendering poorly -- but I'll have to chalk-up the crummy site look to OmniWeb.

And once again, that sucks.

I've been praising your application for a while at my site, and I have received loads of email from people thanking me for turning them on to your browser -- and then I receive, from many of the same people, email asking me why my site looks so much different with OmniWeb. And, as you already know, I'm not the only webmaster dealing with this frustration...

Thanks for listening, and I cross my fingers in hopes I'm not talking to hear myself speak,

Maury

[ 12-27-2001: Message edited by: RAILhead ]

[zappy]

<STRONG>Originally posted by RAILhead:</STRONG>
Thanks for listening, and I cross my fingers in hopes I'm not talking to hear myself speak

Please ... it is just a beta ... calm down ...

[Amorya]

Originally posted by Rickster:
<STRONG>

Single-unmodified-letter-key shortcuts have been removed from the HTML view and lists like the bookmarks view because they've been replaced by "type-ahead" selection. Type the first few letters of a link to select it, then hit return to follow the link. And like files in the Finder, you can select bookmarks by typing the first few letters of a bookmark's label.</STRONG>

What? No option to have either?
Oh well, I can live with that. They made it compatible with Planetarion.com after months of complaining, so I'm sold!!

Amorya

[Hi I'm Ben]

All i know is it works better then their previous versions i've used so i like it.

I really have nothing to bitch and rant about, sorry guys.

One thing that i've noticed that i like about it opposed to Explorer is that highlighting items seems much easier. I also like that the spell checker works with it, I'm no english major and if it weren't for the spell check i'd have whacky ass words all over the place.

[Sophus]

Originally posted by RAILhead:
<STRONG>

... When those situations arise, would that I could, I'd take the blame for my site rendering poorly -- but I'll have to chalk-up the crummy site look to OmniWeb.

]</STRONG>

What a rant...
BTW Railhead, do you know your site looks like sh@t in IE 5.1.3 for Mac osx?
Often it will not render most of the text visibly unless you highlight the whole page. Also there is an error in how IE, OW and mozilla reads the table layout resulting in an extremely wide page and a long horizontal scroll bar. You should have a look at it. BTW, I think the fonts look better with arial in OW than with verdana in IE. Not much of a difference, and it does not look crummy, not due to OW at least.

Sophus :o

[RAILhead]

What a rant...
BTW Railhead, do you know your site looks like sh@t in IE 5.1.3 for Mac osx?
Often it will not render most of the text visibly unless you highlight the whole page. Also there is an error in how IE, OW and mozilla reads the table layout resulting in an extremely wide page and a long horizontal scroll bar. You should have a look at it. BTW, I think the fonts look better with arial in OW than with verdana in IE. Not much of a difference, and it does not look crummy, not due to OW at least.

Thanks for the feedback.

And unless you're overriding my text choice within Explorer (via the Web Content preferences), you'll see my site with 11-point Verdana. Nothing looks like crap about it unless you flat-out just don't like my design -- and that has nothing to do with my site not looking right due to OmniWeb's current font auto-replacement.

I could have the crappiest site in the world to you, but (as I said) if I specify the font my crappy site should be viewed with, why should a web browser default to ignoring my crappy font choice? It shouldn't, plain and simple.

As for text not showing up on your browser, I can't duplicate that on any of my 4 Macs or 2 PeeCees, and no one has ever made me aware of anything like you're describing.

As for there being "an error in how IE, OW and mozilla reads the table layout resulting in an extremely wide page and a long horizontal scroll bar"...there's no error I know of at all in how those applications render tables. The scroll bar is there due to the graphic I use for my "HR" since I want to control the colors: the graphic is wide enough to support Studio displays as well as smaller screens -- and the content of the page reads just as it should. An annoyance, yes, but it doesn't hinder the overall design much at all.

So, I'm sorry you think my site looks like crap, Sophus, but your comments do nothing to support nor refute my complaint that OmniWeb is hard-coded to auto-substitute a web designer's font choice for his/her site (no matter how crappy you think their site is).



Maury

[mrtaber]

So far I like, I like. Biggest change? I can now get to my on-line banking including bill paying

Mark

[asxless]

OK I really like OmniWeb and the 4.1 beta is very nice but... I'm still not ready to pay for it until I can use it for all of the sites I frequently visit.

In particular, I need to be able to able to get to http://personal400.fidelity.com:80/ before I can get the "filthy lucre" out to pay for OmniWeb Has anyone found an Compatability/HTTPS preference combination that works with Fidelity?

TIA - asxless in iLand

BTW If you try the Fidelity URL w/ Omniweb you will need to close the browser window and wait several seconds to regain responsiveness because it pegs the CPU meter.

[ 12-27-2001: Message edited by: asxless ]

[dfiler]

Originally posted by RAILhead:
<STRONG>

...
Though I appreciate the response, Ric, that's no justification for auto-substituting the font. If I want my site to be displayed with 24-point Zapf Dingbats -- so help me, as the designer of my site, I expect my site to look the way I designed it.
...

Maury

[ 12-27-2001: Message edited by: RAILhead ]</STRONG>

Pay no attention to this rant Rick. Its obvious to anyone who read your post and is familiar with software development, that the Omni team made the correct decision for this beta release. Isn't it tough to be compatible when the norm (IE) isn't consistantly standards compliant?

[Jim Paradise]

Originally posted by iNeusch:
<STRONG>

It's only a b1!</STRONG>

That's why I said they'll have to fix some stuff up before the final.

[Jim Paradise]

I've *never* understood this... how come OmniWeb downloads QuickTime films to the hardrive to play them?

And on another note... some Shockwave support would *very* appreciated. Anyway... take a look at the Hotmail rendering problems if possible... always worked until this build.

[Rickster]

how come OmniWeb downloads QuickTime films to the hardrive to play them?

We haven't implemented the ability for plugins to be "top-level documents", so QuickTime and Flash files (and the like) download instead of playing as standalone content in a browser window. Unfortunately, we probably won't have this for 4.1, but expect to have a solution in a future release.

In the meantime, if you see a link to a standalone .mov, you can control-click on it, choose "Copy address of link to clipboard", and paste it into QuickTime Player's Open URL window. Then you get progressive display like when a movie is embedded in a web page.

some Shockwave support would *very* appreciated.

Shockwave/Flash is supported via Macromedia's Flash plugin which comes preinstalled on your Mac OS X system. Shockwave/Director is not (and not in IE either), since Macromedia has yet to port that plugin to Mac OS X.

[ 12-28-2001: Message edited by: Rickster ]

[gsxrboy]

b1 seems to auto launch stuffit or openup etc when a file is finished dloading, where as in the sneakies, it just went to disk, is there a new option somewhere that stops the auto launch or do you simply just have to use the contextual menu to save file... I liked it better the sneaky way.. maybe a new option perhaps..

[iNeusch]

Rick, you're doing a good job with OW, no matter what some people might think (after all, they can still use IE )

Personally, I just bought your software, because I appreciated the work you did for OW, and for the MacOS community
About these font problems? There is much time to fix them, and other sites incompatibility have to be fixed before.

Keep up the good work!

[Boondoggle]

Is this what all the fuss is about?

[Rickster]

"What time is it?", he asks. The scientist responds, "Here's how an atomic clock works..."

b1 seems to auto launch stuffit or openup etc when a file is finished dloading, where as in the sneakies, it just went to disk, is there a new option somewhere that stops the auto launch or do you simply just have to use the contextual menu to save file... I liked it better the sneaky way.. maybe a new option perhaps..

Our user interface paradigm has always been slightly different from that of other browsers. In other browsers, when you click on a link, you either view the linked file immediately (if it's a type the browser knows how to view), or you get the file downloaded to disk in the background and left in some location you may or may not notice it in (if it's not a file type the browser can handle itself).

We think that's a bad idea -- the user won't always know (or notice) when a link they're clicking points to a file OmniWeb knows how to display itself, and we don't want our behavior to be unpredictable. (Especially since OmniWeb's architecture for handling different types of media is so dynamic; it's sometimes possible to gain new supported types without quitting and relaunching.) So, in OmniWeb, when you (left-)click on a link, we always interpret that as meaning that you want to see -- not just fetch and leave sitting somewhere -- the file this link points to, without caring whether it's an HTML file or a JPEG file or a PDF file or an AppleWorks document. If you don't want to see a document right away, control/right-click and choose to save it; again, it's consistent no matter what the file type is.

During OmniWeb 4.1 development, we discovered a problem with this paradigm. Mac OS X 10.1 includes an application called JAR Launcher which allows Java applications packaged as JAR archives to be run by double-clicking them in the Finder. As far as OmniWeb knows, these are documents the same as .TXT files and .PDF files, so we were handing them off to the system to be opened in the preferred application for .JAR files. Which just happens to be an application that runs the contents of the JAR as executable code with the user's full privileges. This is bad -- it means someone could put a link on a web page which, when clicked, downloads and runs code on your system and does nasty stuff. (Actually, JAR Launcher isn't the only potential problem. As soon as someone writes a Perl or Python or shell-script or whatever launcher application, we'd have the same problem with those sorts of things, too.)

So, reluctantly, we have to accept the role of file-type manager, deciding which file types are just plain documents and which can be executable (and potentially malicious) code. (Actually, we've spoken with Apple about this, since it's really a role for the system's file-type-management code, and they seem to agree, so perhaps we'll see Mac OS X handling this itself someday.) Since we're still committed to our idea of what a (left-)click on a link means, we've made it so that files which will open in applications known to be safe will work just as they always did. Potentially unsafe file types and unknown file types will silently save to the desktop (or wherever you prefer). In the sneakypeek builds, you saw various intermediate stages of our progress in implementing a solution to this issue.

Of course, this means we're now doing the very thing we hoped to avoid -- changing our behavior with respect to file types the user might not be aware of, thus changing our behavior unpredictably. But it also means you won't click a link that looks like it's to another HTML page but is actually to a malicious program that compromises your security before you even notice what happened. We intend to improve on the this user experience, though -- we'll eventually get back to delivering on the promise of always behaving predictably, despite having to make exceptions for security.

In the meantime, intrepid users will find that the list of "safe" applications can be edited via <font face = "courier">defaults</font>. To find the keys and values to write in order to hack around with it, dive into the Omniweb.app bundle and look in the Info.plist files for the app and its frameworks and plugins.

[ 12-28-2001: Message edited by: Rickster ]

[iNeusch]

See that answer?

That's one of the reason that got me to buy OW

[ 12-28-2001: Message edited by: iNeusch ]