OmniWeb 5 Beta 2

fryke

fryke

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Quite incredible. Much more stable, faster (switching between workspaces after initially having loaded all of them is lightning fast!) and nicer, too (new thumbnail highlights when you leave the mouse over them gives you title and URL, nice!).

I'm impressed...
 
Seems like it's making great progress. Seems quicker overall and the new tab labels are a nice touch.
 
Yeah... And while there's still the occasional glitch, I think it's gonna be finished in a matter of weeks... Great!
 
Well, it might be a tad slower for some things than Safari, but switching between tabs and workspaces saves about 80% of my time I waste in Safari! All those spinning wheels and waiting for tabs to load in Safari hinders my work far more than a little slower drawing in OmniWeb.
 
cybergoober said:
it is still dog s-l-o-w.
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Example addresses? It would be nice to see what your definition of dog s-l-o-w is.

For example, on my systems both OmniWeb 4.5 and 5 load this page up to three times as fast as Safari.
 
It was slow to load in Safari; it still has not loaded in OmniWeb. And on this page, there is no Post Quick Reply Box.
 
So far it has been way more stable for me. I don't see that much of a slow down in page loading, maybe a bit but nothing major.

Will it replace safari for me? No, but I can see using them both.
 
Replaces Safari for me, definitely, already in b2. About it being 'slow': Just read that clean installing OW 5b2 might help, i.e. delete com.omni... the ow5 plist file and OmniWeb5 in ~/Library/ApplicationSupport. I've tried it: It definitely speeds things up, which shows that the app can - and will - be fast.
 
RacerX said:
Example addresses? It would be nice to see what your definition of dog s-l-o-w is.

For example, on my systems both OmniWeb 4.5 and 5 load this page up to three times as fast as Safari.
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I don't have any specific examples (URLs) of slow loading sites. Just general browsing overall on my system feels much slower in OW vs Safari. I have Safari's cache disabled, so I don't think that's what's going on.

OK. Admittedly OW loaded the Java applet on the page you linked to faster than Safari. Maybe I'm perceiving Safari as being faster because it starts rendering the page immediately. It doesn't wait for all elements on the page to load first.

I will try fryke's recommendation on clean-installing OW and see if that helps.

And to be fair, I did say that I'd wait to see how the final pans out.
In general I try not to get too worked up over Betas. Features can be removed etc.
 
there's a preference in OW about rendering and all items loaded. you could change that. however, i think the default is to start rendering as stuff comes in.
 
Liking it so far... Seems the text input bug has been fixed, well i've yet to come across it yet. Personally this and the frequent crashing, was what was keeping me from 'switching', now i think i am ready. :D Like the mouseover tab info, that is nice. When i first saw it, i thought maybe i was dragging a cell of text (thats what it looks like on Safari :p)


Good Stuff.

Thanks for the tip fryke, i'm gonna try that.

How has everyone found crashing so far? Its not crashed on me, yet...
 
cybergoober said:
And to be fair, I did say that I'd wait to see how the final pans out.
In general I try not to get too worked up over Betas. Features can be removed etc.
Click to expand...

I agree actually. I have OmniWeb 5 on only one system... and it isn't my primary system.

OmniWeb 4.1/4.2 was my default until the release of the Safari beta. At that point OmniWeb became my "work" browser (I use the HTML editor for cleaning up sites I do). When the betas of OmniWeb 4.5 came out I was not that impressed and didn't use them much (again, installing them only on my secondary system). But shortly after the final release release of 4.5 last summer, OmniWeb reclaimed the default browser position on my system.

I, personally, don't see a big enough difference in load/render speed between OmniWeb 4.5 and Safari to tell the difference most of the time. What finally does it for me is that OmniWeb has a ton of features I use constantly that I miss when they are not there. One example is the fact that this post is being typed into a separate window from the original with it's small text field box. The text boxes on almost all the forums I post at are just too small for regular writing. When I was using Safari I had to keep TextEdit open all the time to do the same type of thing that I take for granted in OmniWeb.

Plus, I tend to use the editing abilities quite a bit. I can edit code from a site that is being displayed and redisplay it with the other site elements right in the browser (with anything else I've worked with I would have to have all of the page elements on my system to get an accurate preview). That is just really cool.

And I was used to the OmniWeb google search feature from before Safari. So even though I see where having an extra field for a search is a great idea, I am able to use OmniWeb's way just as easily.

OmniWeb was just worth the money I payed. And after moving to WebCore, it replace Safari for me.

For those who don't know about the google search feature I was talking about, in OmniWeb 4.x if you type google and then the search works in the address field, it does a google search for those works. Not as nice as Safari's extra field, and one of the reason I welcome the change in 5.
 
About that searching in the location bar: The good thing about it in OmniWeb is that you can add ANY search engine yourself. Search the internet movie database, search Apple's Quicktime trailer database, search Google/Yahoo/Altavista/whatever - you just add a 'search shortcut' to the shortcuts and can now do things like:

"movie underworld 2003" (searching imdb.com)
"trailer pixar nemo" (searching Apple's trailers)
"google anything" (...)

I think the location bar is a _great_ location for such things, as it's becoming kind of the command line tool for your browser.

There's 'sogudi' for Safari, which tries to accomplish the same thing. Works quite fine, although you have to enter an additional space after shortcuts, or else Safari tries to locate a host it won't find...

I guess die-hard OW fans agree upon the fact that OW just has thousands of usable features that no other browser has even started to develop. In many ways, OW is light-years ahead of the crowd. Sadly, those features are not easy to market, because most people just don't expect much more from a browser than they already have. For example the source editor. Or the text-entry-field-popup window. Or the ad-blocking mechanisms (light-years ahead of what comes with other browsers). Just too good.

I have _one_ concern with OW5: Its tab-implementation takes up too much space for my lil' iBook. I use OW5 when I've connected the additional 1280*1024 display, but when I'm on the road, Safari is it for now. I _do_ hope they add an alternative view for the tabs.
 
fryke said:
I have _one_ concern with OW5: Its tab-implementation takes up too much space for my lil' iBook. I use OW5 when I've connected the additional 1280*1024 display, but when I'm on the road, Safari is it for now. I _do_ hope they add an alternative view for the tabs.
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well u could allways try minimizing the sidebar, but then its difficult to see which site is which.
personally i dont think the sidebar is a problem. on my 15inch powerbook ive got space. maybe on a 12inch it might get a bit squashed.. but.. who cares :p
 
soulseek: there are QUITE a few PB 12" and iBook owners (all white iBooks are 1024*768). there might be an option to have the drawer _below_ the window, maybe? Right now, my only solution is to effectively hide/show the thumbnail drawer, which works quite well, but isn't what I want the final verdict to bel.

The cost of OmniWeb 5 is 29.95 USD, less if you already have an OW 4 license.
 
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