OmniWeb 4.1

[iknownotwhoiam]

does anyone know when a new verison of omniweb will be released? it is a great browser...just a little slow. i'm hoping that a new release will be out soon and that it will be faster...can anyone help me out?
axel.

[Red Phoenix]

Here is a post from the OmniWeb mailing list:

Thanks for all your feedback about OmniWeb 4.0.5 on 10.1, everyone. It looks like 4.0.5 has more incompatibilities with 10.1 than we expected:

* CrashCatcher doesn't work
* Source code editing doesn't work
* OmniWeb crashes on quit (depending on your preference settings)
* OmniWeb sometimes crashes when closing windows
* Font metrics aren't correctly processed for some fonts (notably Japanese fonts)
* Images are scaled based on source DPI, rather than being displayed at pixel size

We're working hard to quickly get you a release which fixes all those problems. We'd prefer for that release to be based on OmniWeb 4.1, of course, and we're hoping to get a 4.1 beta out in the next day or two, but if that doesn't work out we'll bring our 10.1 fixes back over to the 4.0 branch and release a 4.0.6 update. (In fact, we may do both.)

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Ken

I hope Ken Case doesn't mind my quoting him. Hopefully, the 4.1 beta will work. I'd love to try out the new features they've added.

[benpoole]

... sound like a fine company. I do like their website.

That kind of response is what we all dream of, unlike some other companies I could mention...

[doppelbock]

There is a beta of 4.1 posted here:

http://www.omnigroup.com/ftp/pub/outgoing/sneakypeek/

give it a shot folks......

[doppelbock]

As always with a beta, best to read the ReadMe carefully......

From: Ken Case <kc@omnigroup.com>
Date: Thu Oct 04, 2001 11:01:32 US/Pacific
Subject: OmniWeb 4.1 sneaky peek 1 is now available

Please note that this release has some major memory leaks, but I thought it was worth pushing this out the door so people can start testing the new capabilities while I work on tracking down leaks.

As with all "sneaky peek" releases, please send feedback on this release to sneakypeek@omnigroup.com, not omniweb4@omnigroup.com: we'll see your message much more quickly that way.

Some quick notes about this release:

We've implemented a lot of the improvements which we promised for 4.1, including improved support for Java applets, Flash 5 support (via Macromedia's plug-in), some HTML improvements, and a new JavaScript engine based on Mozilla's "SpiderMonkey." We've also made other improvements such as much faster access to history, experimental speech recognition, an improved preferences interface, new compatibility preferences, and proxy configuration using system preferences. And, of course, this release fixes some compatibility issues with 10.1.

The big place where we're currently falling short is in implementing the complete JavaScript Document Object Model: we ran into some unexpected problems with the new SpiderMonkey code (it turned out their code wasn't thread-safe) which we had to fix before continuing our general work on JavaScript, so while we've implemented more of Netscape's DOM we still haven't implemented all of it.

Again, send feedback to sneakypeek@omnigroup.com. Thanks, and enjoy!

Ken

[doppelbock]

Been trying it out a bit tonight....

Positive - it's a helluva lot faster...launches quickly and renders quickly...quite an improvement.

Negative - still doesn't get me into my banks web site....some sites still don't render properly.

it's getting there........

[Red Phoenix]

I haven't had it open long enough to worry about the memory leaks that the read me talks about, so I can't give a full impression. Overall, though, it's really nice. The mild enhancements to the interface are great, and it's definitely a lot speedier (heck, 4.0.5 already had gotten speedier just by installing OS X.I).

[weric]

omniweb 4.1 sp1 is a lot faster and it has the best page caching i have ever seen. i managed to keep at least 10 pages in the history and jump between them without omniweb needing to contact the internet. with ie, the best i ever get is 3 pages.