[Mike S.]

That would be libel according to the cigar smoker.

[nebben123]

Originally posted by Cadaver:
Minor bug report - hope its OK to post here...

While beta 6.1 is far beyond the first beta, I still notice that sometimes I get some rendering issues with text inside input/editable text boxes (like this one). Sometimes, I wont be able to see the text at all, and other times (after using the pop-up OmniWeb text editor) the text background will be gray and uneditable.

I also have the same problem with the beta 6.1 (which is the first time I've ever tried OmniWeb) ... sometimes I'll have to scroll the text box up and down, or scroll the page until the text box disappears, and then scroll back to the text box to make the text inside it reappear (does that make sense?). Makes it very difficult to use forms.

Other times the glowing blue border around the text boxes gets messed up too, as I type, the border will become thicker and kinda mangled in some parts. Clicking outside the box, and then back inside to regain focus fixes it until I start typing again.

And sometimes everything works fine.

Very weird!

Other issues:

- It crashes at least once an hour on average. Safari crashes on me about once a week.

- Image dimensions are not displayed in the titlebar like on all other browsers.

- No tabbing to drop-down menus, check boxes, or radio buttons.


All the other stuff like custom preferences and workspaces and image blocking etc etc are tres cool though! If they can fix these last few nagging problems, I'm definitely going to buy. Being able to easily block images (not even necessarily ads) and assign site-specific preferences in general is easily worth the $30. The other stuff is just icing on the cake, and I have to say I've gotten quite used to the vertical tabs (which I thought I was going to hate... until I discovered CMD-OPT-T) =)


Ben

[MrBS]

Originally posted by nebben123:
I also have the same problem with the beta 6.1 (which is the first time I've ever tried OmniWeb) ... sometimes I'll have to scroll the text box up and down, or scroll the page until the text box disappears, and then scroll back to the text box to make the text inside it reappear (does that make sense?). Makes it very difficult to use forms.

Other times the glowing blue border around the text boxes gets messed up too, as I type, the border will become thicker and kinda mangled in some parts. Clicking outside the box, and then back inside to regain focus fixes it until I start typing again.

And sometimes everything works fine.

Very weird!


Other issues:

- It crashes at least once an hour on average. Safari crashes on me about once a week.

- Image dimensions are not displayed in the titlebar like on all other browsers.

- No tabbing to drop-down menus, check boxes, or radio buttons.

The text area thing is a well-known bug.

The crashes seem to be happening way too often for you... it could be the sites your visiting, or it could be a corrupted history file or sumthing like that. Might want to try removing OW's stuff in your ~/Library/Application\ Support/OmniWeb\ 5. Or it could just be that the sites you frequent tickle a bug. Send in your crash reports and tell them where you were in the feedback.

The image dimensions aren't really a bug... more a feature request. Instead of opening an image in a new window to find that stuff out in OW you can just hit apple-i on a webpage (it has lots of handy information down there, including the dimensions of all images).

As for tabbing to the form elements, OW listens to your system prefs>keyboard. Choose to turn on full keyboard access.

~BS

[JKT]

Actually, the first thing to delete is the com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5 folder in ~/Library/Caches and see if that reduces the problem. You don't want to lose all your preferences before trying the easiest path first do you?

[MrBS]

That's a much better idea. Much better.

~BS

[nebben123]

Thanks for the suggestions.

And actually, I do have full keyboard access turned on (works great in Safari) but for some reason OW still isn't tabbing to any for elements besides text fields. Drop-down menus, check boxes, radio buttons, and submit buttons are all ignored.

Am I hitting a bug, or is this just not implemented?


Ben

[JKT]

I don't think it has been implemented (yet... presumably it'll make it into a future version). FWIW, once you have clicked a drop-down menu, you *can* then type the letters/numbers of your desired target to jump to it.

[ratlater]

Originally posted by nebben123:
Thanks for the suggestions.

And actually, I do have full keyboard access turned on (works great in Safari) but for some reason OW still isn't tabbing to any for elements besides text fields. Drop-down menus, check boxes, radio buttons, and submit buttons are all ignored.

Am I hitting a bug, or is this just not implemented?


Ben

This is webcore issue I believe. Safari didn't implement it until v120 or v125, so I'm hoping OmniWeb 5.1 which will use the latest webcore will allow you to tab to all form elements on a page.

-matt

[nebben123]

I hit another bug today:

When viewing Slashdot (fwiw I use the "lite" mode), replies to comments that use the <em> tag show up as regular, un-emphasized, text. It makes it very difficult to determine what is the quoted text and what is the new reply when it all looks the same.

Is this a known bug?

Ben

[Rickster]

Yes, it's the same bug as the missing italics -- the current release doesn't manufacture font variants that don't exist (so you'll see bold for Lucida Grande but not italic, and neither bold nor italic for Geneva, for example). A workaround (until the next beta) is to use a font which has all the variants you want to see (such as Helvetica or Times).

Keyboard navigation (to form elements other than text input boxes) is indeed a new-WebCore thing. I noticed Tim2 doing some work on this recently, so I imagine you'll be seeing it in 5.1.

[flysky]

Rick and Tim:

You may not know or may not be able to answer, but is there any chance that, in the near future (perhaps after 5.0 is final), OGroup will offer a package upgrade for OWeb, OGraffle, OOutliner, etc.? I originally license the apps that way, and I was going to use the early upgrade for just OW, but if there's a chance for a package, I'll wait. Thanks for any info you can provide.

[Rickster]

That'd be good feedback to send to [email protected]. In general it sounds like a good idea, but it could get rather complicated: new versions don't come out for all of our products at the same time, so we'd have to support a number of different bundle-upgrade paths based on when people bought the bundle.

[nebben123]

I came across this bug today... whenever I tried to load any new page, I got the following message in the browser window:

Cannot Load Address
*** -[NSCFDictionary setObject:forKey:]: attempt to insert nil value


?????

I had to restart OW to get it working again.

I'm sending it in to OG... but I was wondering if anyone else has encountered this, and what does it mean?

Ben

[Catfish_Man]

Originally posted by nebben123:
I came across this bug today... whenever I tried to load any new page, I got the following message in the browser window:

Cannot Load Address
*** -[NSCFDictionary setObject:forKey:]: attempt to insert nil value


?????

I had to restart OW to get it working again.

I'm sending it in to OG... but I was wondering if anyone else has encountered this, and what does it mean?

Ben

It's a cocoa error message. It means (in layman's terms) that they tried to add something to a dictionary without anything to look it up with (or add something for looking stuff up without anything for it to look up). I get it fairly often in my programs, usually when I forget to retain an object.

[cpac]

I sent this feedback, but I thought i'd post and see if anybody else is seeing the same problems:

In prior versions as well as in OW 5.0b6.1, I occasionally find sites where a page icon should load, but doesn't for some reason. (In some cases it flashes as though it were going to appear, but is quickly replaced by the default OW bookmark icon).

Some sites where this happens are:

www.orbitz.com (should be a blue "O")
www.pbs.org (should be the PBS logo - black circle w/ head in profile)
and
www.mozilla.org/projects/camino/ (should be mozilla red dinosaur head)

If it helps, these all work fine in Safari....

[EdipisReks]

i'm a long time mozilla user, and have been using firefox/firebird for a while. i just got around to downloading the omniweb beta, and i really like it. the side tabs took a while to get used to, and its a little show, but its great. being able to take advantage of the universal spellcheck is especially nice. if they boost the rendering speed a little bit i'll buy a license when the full version comes out.

[Khoth]

The guy earlier who asked if he was the only one b6 took two minutes to start up for isn't. Well, it takes about a minute on my computer.

[Mike S.]

Originally posted by Khoth:
The guy earlier who asked if he was the only one b6 took two minutes to start up for isn't. Well, it takes about a minute on my computer.

A minute? It launches in about 12 seconds for me and I've got a G3/400 upgraded 8600 :-P

[Tim2 at Omni]

Originally posted by Khoth:
The guy earlier who asked if he was the only one b6 took two minutes to start up for isn't. Well, it takes about a minute on my computer.

We've heard reports of this happening but we've been unable to reproduce it.

For comparison, it usually takes about 3-4 seconds on my 1Ghz Powerbook.

I'd be curious to see what OmniWeb is doing while it starts up on your machine -- if I knew, I could definitely make it a smoother and faster experience for you.

Could you take a sample of OmniWeb while it is launching by running the following command in Terminal:

Code:
sample OmniWeb 5

...and send me a private message with the contents of the file it spits out into /tmp?

If not, that's alright, but I'm sure you (and other people) might appreciate it if this problem disappeared.

[iNeusch]

Strange things..

1) I'm using the RSS feed reader, and when there are new items to read, I click onr of them. Instead ofopenning a new tab (like my prefs say) it opens a new window...
2) When setting a new homepage, the prefs are not saved until... still wasn't able to know what triggered it
3) Can't use the apple-up and down arrows to scroll the page, it switches the tabs... any idea how I could fix this ?

Sorry for these, I needed to ask
I enjoy b6 a lot

[JKT]

Originally posted by iNeusch:
Strange things..

1) I'm using the RSS feed reader, and when there are new items to read, I click onr of them. Instead ofopenning a new tab (like my prefs say) it opens a new window...
2) When setting a new homepage, the prefs are not saved until... still wasn't able to know what triggered it
3) Can't use the apple-up and down arrows to scroll the page, it switches the tabs... any idea how I could fix this ?

Sorry for these, I needed to ask
I enjoy b6 a lot

1) Is that from the dock menu? If so, I think this is just an UI issue at present that will hopefully be fixed in a later version

2) You need to be registered to save a new homepage - have you bought a newe licence yet?

3) I don't see that this is a bug - why do you need to use the command key to scroll the page? Why not just use the arrow keys or the page/up down keys by themselves?

[iNeusch]

Originally posted by JKT:
1) Is that from the dock menu? If so, I think this is just an UI issue at present that will hopefully be fixed in a later version

2) You need to be registered to save a new homepage - have you bought a newe licence yet?

3) I don't see that this is a bug - why do you need to use the command key to scroll the page? Why not just use the arrow keys or the page/up down keys by themselves?

1) Yes, from the dock
2) Yes, I've registered
3) OK, my mistake... I want to go to the top of the page, not just scroll

[larkost]

iNeusch: on item 3, if you have a "home" key on your keyboard this will take you to the top of the page. This is semi-standard across all applications (meaning it should be, but not everyone got the memo).

[Krypton]

This may seem a bit daft to some people, but is OW 5.1 effectively done? Will there be long to wait after the final release - which I'm assuming is imminent.

[Tim2 at Omni]

Originally posted by Krypton:
This may seem a bit daft to some people, but is OW 5.1 effectively done? Will there be long to wait after the final release - which I'm assuming is imminent.

It's not done, but it's going a lot smoother than we expected. Of course, the WebCore merge is not all we're doing -- we've switched over to the same Java plugin that Safari uses, which means that Java support in OmniWeb 5.1 is much better, and far less buggy.

...And I'm sure we're going to fix some crashers and misc. other bugs, too.

I can't give you an estimate, but I can assure you that the follow-up release will be fairly quick to come out, since so many people are clamouring for at least the updated WebCore.

[Mike S.]

Dave Hyatt posted a very interesting dissertation in his web log on rendering speed vs. perceived rendering speed and changes he has made to Safari to make it appear to be much faster. You can read it here.

Are these optimizations being applied to WebCore or Safari? In other words, will OmniWeb inherit these perceived speed boosts when it merges with whatever version of WebCore Apple releases them with?

It's very interesting, any comments from the OmniDevs?

[Neo.cmg]

Originally posted by Tim2 at Omni:
It's not done, but it's going a lot smoother than we expected. Of course, the WebCore merge is not all we're doing -- we've switched over to the same Java plugin that Safari uses, which means that Java support in OmniWeb 5.1 is much better, and far less buggy.

...And I'm sure we're going to fix some crashers and misc. other bugs, too.

I can't give you an estimate, but I can assure you that the follow-up release will be fairly quick to come out, since so many people are clamouring for at least the updated WebCore.

Guys at OmniGroup,

I've got to say the most frequent problem I've run into when I use OmniWeb v5b6.1 and earlier versions which I'm beginning to become more and more annoyed with is the fact that when I launch OmniWeb many of the tabs do not completely load, or at least the status indicator continuously spins indicating that they are somehow incomplete. I can't say it happens to particular sites all of the time, as I've seen it have trouble with pretty much all the sites I visit at one time or another; though, others display this behavior more regularly such as (maccentral, abcnews, cnn, versiontracker, and others).

I would wonder if this even degrades the app's performance by having all these different websites in limbo. I have the app setup so it opens several websites (maybe 12-15 or so) at once each in a separate tab, so I can effectively jump from website to website. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has OmniWeb setup this way. I'm not sure what's causing things to behave in such a manner, and I've seen this problem mentioned several times by others through the various public beta builds, but I have yet to see it fixed. I don't know if it's just me, but this is really starting to bug me and I just hope that a fix arrives soon.

Neo.cmg

[Tim2 at Omni]

Originally posted by Neo.cmg:
I've got to say the most frequent problem I've run into when I use OmniWeb v5b6.1 and earlier versions which I'm beginning to become more and more annoyed with is the fact that when I launch OmniWeb many of the tabs do not completely load, or at least the status indicator continuously spins indicating that they are somehow incomplete.

...

I'm not sure what's causing things to behave in such a manner, and I've seen this problem mentioned several times by others through the various public beta builds, but I have yet to see it fixed. I don't know if it's just me, but this is really starting to bug me and I just hope that a fix arrives soon.

It's not that we haven't tried to fix this -- it's been a very high priority here lately. It's just that what appears to the user as one bug is actually a few dozen separate bugs with the exact same effect, so fixing them all is a pretty laborious task.

We've fixed the abcnews case, as well as several others since b6 shipped. Hopefully the next version will be better for you.

[MrBS]

It might be nice if there were a [hidden] pref for numbers of tabs to load at once. Like say... load the first 3 first then as one of those finishes start loading 4, etc. Don't make the user pay the overhead for all 12 sites up front, and don't make them wait to load #4 after the first 3....

Maybe just have a checkbox option that give priority to the first tab and then lets the rest of them fight it out. Give the user something to read before rendering the whole workspace.
~BS

[JKT]

I have a feeling that this is pretty much exactly how it works anyway - take a look at Network Activity the next time you load up a workspace containing several sites for the first time. It seems to me that they are loaded in stages of 4 or so sites at a time. I imagine there is a hidden pref to change that value though...

i noticed this as, in one of the previous betas, if one site was failing to load in full it could block the loading of others until you aborted it.

[Mike Pither]

Originally posted by Neo.cmg:
Guys at OmniGroup,

I've got to say the most frequent problem I've run into when I use OmniWeb v5b6.1 and earlier versions which I'm beginning to become more and more annoyed with is the fact that when I launch OmniWeb many of the tabs do not completely load, or at least the status indicator continuously spins indicating that they are somehow incomplete. I can't say it happens to particular sites all of the time, as I've seen it have trouble with pretty much all the sites I visit at one time or another; though, others display this behavior more regularly such as (maccentral, abcnews, cnn, versiontracker, and others).

I would wonder if this even degrades the app's performance by having all these different websites in limbo. I have the app setup so it opens several websites (maybe 12-15 or so) at once each in a separate tab, so I can effectively jump from website to website. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has OmniWeb setup this way. I'm not sure what's causing things to behave in such a manner, and I've seen this problem mentioned several times by others through the various public beta builds, but I have yet to see it fixed. I don't know if it's just me, but this is really starting to bug me and I just hope that a fix arrives soon.

Neo.cmg

I also had this problem with the first builds but I don't get it anymore even with workspaces containing many tabs. I guess this ties in with what Tim2 at omni says, that it's not a single bug that that causes this

[sghms]

There are a few issues which I think are 'bugs' of sorts though I am not certain.

1) When I try to read the review of themes over at Macthemes.net , two links should appear below each theme which allow you to either continue reading the review or to download the theme. When using Omniweb 5 b6, the links don't and in fact the two links appear at the top of page and they are for the NEOS theme alone.

This problem does not occur in Safari 1.2.1 nor opera 7.5. I have changed the site preferences to IE 6/Safari/IE 5.2. (Mac) with no luck . I have flushed the cache and deleted history within the browser, as well the omniweb 5 cache folder and history.ox file within my home folder.

Anybody else have this issue ?


2) When I initially attempt to post in this forum, The text doesn't appear in the reply box until I click outside the box. Even then its painfully slow. However if I close the browser and then it reloads the reply page when I open it again its fine


3) In the front page of The Times of London (Online) there should appear rolling headlines to the right of where it says PA News (top centre). It doesn't appear nor does it work in Safari. It will work in IE 5.2.3 and Opera 7.5

Also both Safari and Omniweb create this wide white gap between the Section Titles in the left margin and main body of headlines, articles in the centre. There should not be this wide space and IE 5.2.3, Opera 7.5 render this correctly. I have tried site preferences with no luck


4) I still feel it's a little slow in UI responsiveness especially when loading up a workspace with lots of tabs. However I realize this is probably due to it being a beta and I look forward to the final product. The faster it gets the latest webcore, the sooner I can love it more




Apart from that I am very impressed with this browser. I love the workspaces and being able to take snapshots. Also being able to see the titles of 25+ tabs in the drawer. Much tidier than the Safari method


Could you please consider the option of being able to put the tab drawer on the top and bottom as well. I would like to try it out and think it would work nicely


I also like the ability to use bookmark spacers and being able to backup to my idisk. Also I don't know what it's called but just being able to type in (for example) max themes and it searches my history to bring up appropriate web addresses is very impressive. Kudos on that.


The most impressive feature without a doubt IMHO is how it saves the webpages I am on even when Omniweb crashes. That is awesome


I haven't bought a licence as yet but that's because of the reasons above. However my resolve is weakening and with the $ being so weak against the � it is quite cheap at the mo to buy a licence and I fear I shall lighten my pocket soonish


Thanks in advance for any response and advice You chaps and chapettes should pat yourself on the back for building potentially the best browser on any platform

[BZ]

http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/

Will not load at all in OW.

Am I crazy?

BZ

[superfula]

Originally posted by BZ:
http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/

Will not load at all in OW.

Am I crazy?

BZ

I don't know if you are crazy or not, but no, it doesn't load in OW for me either.

[JKT]

Nope, nor does www.anandtech.com. This also happened with www.real.com in an earlier build and that is now fixed. Send feedback to OG.

[TheIceMan]

This might be a dumb question, but why does OW use Mail.app to send the feedback instead of doing it like Safari through the browser? I don't use Mail at all, only web-based email so I can't send feedback that way. Can OW be set to use the browser instead? Just wondering.

[F_Elz]

Yes I would also like this.

[larkost]

superfula: The problem with Anandtech is because of invalid gzip compression. If you disable the "inflate" plugin (and restart) you will be able to get into the site. In the past OmniGroup had made specific exceptions for this sort of thing, but I think the invalid gzip'ing is becoming common enough to either re-do the plugin, or make it a site-specific preference.

[sghms]

Originally posted by JKT:
Nope, nor does www.anandtech.com. This also happened with www.real.com in an earlier build and that is now fixed. Send feedback to OG.

Anandtech will load fine if you go into site preferences and select IE 6 as the browser ID string

[larkost]

Just to add a capstone to the anandtech problem:

The reason that it works if you choose IE 6 is because the site switches from trying to send the html in "deflate" format to "gzip", and the "indlafte" plugin for OmniWeb handles the gzip content fine.

I have a email on the OmniWeb-l list to this effect.

[bewebste]

I've been having something strange happen with OmniWeb and I was wondering if anyone else had had the same experience. What will happen is that a crash will occur and OmniCrashCatcher will come up and do its thing. The strange part is that OmniWeb continues to run and function normally, even though it has "crashed". I can continue to use it for quite some time until I feel like sending in the crash report, at which point the crash catcher kills off the OmniWeb process. Is this a known issue?

[larkost]

bewebste: OmniWeb usually runs with quite a number of threads, and the crashcatcher will catch a crash in any thread. Sometimes the crash will happen in a relatively isolated thread, that does not interfere with the normal operation of other parts of the browser. Usually if you continue on eventually this broken thread will progressively kill the rest of the application (when other things try and use that resource).

The crashcatcher takes the appropriate approach and fires peremptorily.

[GeeYouEye]

Originally posted by Tim2 at Omni:
We've heard reports of this happening but we've been unable to reproduce it.

For comparison, it usually takes about 3-4 seconds on my 1Ghz Powerbook.

I'd be curious to see what OmniWeb is doing while it starts up on your machine -- if I knew, I could definitely make it a smoother and faster experience for you.

Could you take a sample of OmniWeb while it is launching by running the following command in Terminal:

Code:
sample OmniWeb 5

...and send me a private message with the contents of the file it spits out into /tmp?

If not, that's alright, but I'm sure you (and other people) might appreciate it if this problem disappeared.

Would love to, but the output of the sample is more than 200,000 characters over the PM limit.

[trimaniax]

One question about OmniWeb. I apparently played around with the Snapshot or Workspace feature (I can't remember which) and now when I open OmniWeb it opens with the same set of tabs each time. How can I get OmniWeb to go back to opening just my start page instead?

Thanks.

[cpac]

open your workspaces, click on the default workspace (or whatever workspace you're currently using), uncheck "Save Windows"

[JKT]

Originally posted by GeeYouEye:
Would love to, but the output of the sample is more than 200,000 characters over the PM limit.

Then send it to [email protected] with an appropriate heading (e.g. sample 15 of OW5b6.1 during long startup time blah blah blah), or via the Send Feedback option in the Help menu.

[turtle777]

Just wanted to make a post too in one of the longest threads ever.

I don't have time to read through all this, so this might be a double post

-t

[JKT]

Bah... this is a short thread compared to the OW threads of old - still another 200 or so to go before we get anywhere near the longest IIRC!

[TheIceMan]

Originally posted by trimaniax:
One question about OmniWeb. I apparently played around with the Snapshot or Workspace feature (I can't remember which) and now when I open OmniWeb it opens with the same set of tabs each time. How can I get OmniWeb to go back to opening just my start page instead?

Thanks.

I clicked on Workspace-> Take Snapshot and I'm stuck with the same problem. I tried cpac's advice to: open your workspaces, click on the default workspace (or whatever workspace you're currently using), uncheck "Save Windows". But that does not seem to work.

[Neo.cmg]

Originally posted by TheIceMan:
I clicked on Workspace-> Take Snapshot and I'm stuck with the same problem. I tried cpac's advice to: open your workspaces, click on the default workspace (or whatever workspace you're currently using), uncheck "Save Windows". But that does not seem to work.

Okay, here's what I do. I have a workspace in which I have all the tabs set up the way in which I want and for this workspace I have the "Save Windows" option checked. Then, I have a separate workspace that is just my start page. I quit OmniWeb with this workspace, so that every time I relaunch OmniWeb I don't have to wait for all those tabs in my other workspace to load. If I want to read through them, I can just hit the corresponding F-key. That way, I always just start up with just my start page (which happens to be the OmniWeb default until they finish v. 5). Does that help with what you were asking?

Neo.cmg