The Competition...

[BwanaZulia]

Really, all browsers are competition and since the amount of pay browsers is dropping so rapidly, I thought we could look at some of the competition and what OmniWeb can bring to the table.

Safari
- Good RSS feeds
- Fast
- Standards based

FireFox
- Cross platform
- Extensions
- Themes
- Fast

Shiira
- New unique and interesting features
- Sidebar history
- Sidebar RSS feeds
- Sidebar page holders (s)

Discuss.

BZ

[JKT]

For a thorough listing, let's not forget to include what unique features OmniWeb offers as well:
- Workspaces
- In depth site-specific preferences and site-specific download destinations
- Simple RSS interface (nice for some, too simple for others; UI could be nicer looking either way)
- Thumbnail tabs which can be manipulated in full (drag and drop sorting; copy/cut/paste- able)
- iDisk/WebDAV synching (could be improved to include Workspaces, Cookies, etc)
- independent text input field editor
- Source editor
- Save as single page PDF
- A useful download manager
- Powerful bookmark/history searching
- URL completion that doesn't suck
- URL addition to comments field of downloads
- Bookmark sharing


A few others to include in the mix:

Opera
- Zoom display

Firefox and Opera
- Scaled images (to fit the browser window if they exceed the boundaries)

For me, the features from the other browsers I'd like to see are:
1. Better RSS feed UI
2. Scaled images
3. Better archiving of pages (e.g. pdf's with active links).

Extensions/extensibility might be nice (though they aren't without their own issues in Firefox), but I can't really see anyone developing any for a niche browser on a niche platform.
Themes just don't interest me, but I understand that others would like them.

[Cortig]

Safari
- Good RSS feeds

Good RSS feeds???? I positively *hate* RSS in Safari. Maybe through Sage in FireFox, but certainly not the way it's implemented in Safari. If I want a decent feedreader, I get NetNewsWire.
I believe that OW is better at feeds than Safari. At least in OW we can see new feeds in the application icon, browse through all of them, open them in new windows...

Now FireFox is a different story. The extensions make it a very powerful tool. I use several Bio-data mining and molecular biology in FF for instance. All the available extensions really make the difference in a browser that I would otherwise not really care too much about (not very well integrated in the system, etc...).

Corentin

[bethkatz17582]

Firefox's big adoption point is that it is really cross-platform in that it runs on Mac and Linux as well as Windows. So web developers will look at how their pages look in Firefox and will respond to complaints that it isn't right in Firefox. The local school district even suggests using it (with a link on the home page). But in doing so, Firefox doesn't quite match any of the places where it can run. I'm certainly not suggesting OW go cross-platform.

Firefox is on my dock. OW is my web browser. I'm not shopping for another one.

Features I find most useful in OW:
- tabs with each having its own history
- workspaces with different characteristics (ex. save current state or not)
- printing scale to fit (lets you print web pages at normal printing size)
- site preferences

[Ward]

Earlier posts skipped over one of my favorite OmniWeb features:

- Search in toolbar can be extended with a right-click on a Search box in any Web page.

[BwanaZulia]

Going over the GOOD OmniWeb features on the OmniGroup website is a little redundant. What I was trying to do was talk about the competition and where OmniWeb could get some good ideas.

BZ

[Forrest]

Having not used Opera in a while, how is its zoomed display better than the zoom display in OS X?

[JKT]

I just added that as a unique feature of Opera that is potentially of some use (though not to me personally). I guess it has the advantage of keeping your toolbar in full view whereas Universal Access Zoom will lead to at least some, if not a lot, of it disappearing from view at any one time.

[BwanaZulia]

Another killer feature in Shiira.

- When you close a tab it goes back to the last tab you had open NOT the tab next to it. This is is great for popping lots of tabs and closing them to get back to the original one.

BZ

[JKT]

Another browser to add to the discussion:

iRider (http://www.irider.com/irider/index.htm) which preceded OmniWeb for having graphical tabs. Some of the features the demo video shows look interesting. The three that look most useful to me are:

- Pinning tabs
- Nesting tabs
- Copying a tab as a URL (what would be truly great would be if you could select what tags surrounded the URL so e.g. you could copy a tab with UBB url or img tags already around the URL - it would make linking to sites or images in forum posts much easier)

[Greg Titus]

- Copying a tab as a URL
Just a quick note: OmniWeb does have this. Just click over into the tab drawer and cut/copy/paste as you desire. Paste into some other app or into an address field or wherever and you get the tab URL.

[JKT]

Just to clarify:

I meant by control clicking so that you don't have to switch tabs. E.g. I am browsing the forum right now and e.g. I want to link to the third tab up in my drawer in this thread. At the moment, I have to click the third tab up to give it focus, copy it, then click back to my other tab, paste. Wouldn't it be lovely if I could just control-click the other tab and select from the convenient Copy URL menu options:

Copy URL>http://
Copy URL>[url]
Copy URL>[img]

?

[kbotc]

I personally think that adding bb-style code auto-complete to the default browser seems a bit stupid, especially cluttering up the already full contextual menu (Seeing as not all people visit places where they would even make sense). Sounds WAY more like something a plugin should do. How about that, OmniGroup? A fully documented plug-in design so us Mac developers can write things similar to FireFox's extensions?

[BwanaZulia]

Opera 9:

- Widgets (not really needed)
- Sitespecifc prefs
- SSL Certificae owner in URL (nice feature)
- Faster
- Built-in BitTorrent Support

BZ

[JKT]

I personally think that adding bb-style code auto-complete to the default browser seems a bit stupid, especially cluttering up the already full contextual menu (Seeing as not all people visit places where they would even make sense). Sounds WAY more like something a plugin should do. How about that, OmniGroup? A fully documented plug-in design so us Mac developers can write things similar to FireFox's extensions?
You misunderstand - I'm talking about the tab contextual menu, not the window contextual menu. I think the tab contextual menu could stand to gain one more menu entry (the bb-style/http/whatever code choices could be a submenu selection).

[kbotc]

You misunderstand - I'm talking about the tab contextual menu, not the window contextual menu. I think the tab contextual menu could stand to gain one more menu entry (the bb-style/http/whatever code choices could be a submenu selection).
I don't have a problem with adding a new menu entry there. I just don't think that BB or code stuff should EVER be included by default. You seem to forget how easily confused the average person can get when things they don't recognize are presented to them. (And when they get confused, they get angry. Don't ask me why or tell me that they don't, as I deal with alot of people via Adium that can't understand why certain text features don't work the exact same way as X client does it, and then they proceed to yell at us on IRC for awhile)

[JKT]

Ah, true. I'm thinking of my own power-browsing mode. Still it would be a nice feature to have (a hidden preference perhaps). A simple "Copy Address of Tab" would suffice for everyone I would think.

[Ken Case]

I think it would make sense to add "Copy Tab" to the context menu. (Note that copying a tab also copies its address.)

[mulletman13]

Hrmm... I guess we aren't considering Camino at all?

[JKT]

If there is something good that Camino does, then add it here. I never use it myself (always seemed overly simplistic, like Safari, for my tastes).

[Ilgaz]

Good RSS feeds???? I positively *hate* RSS in Safari. Maybe through Sage in FireFox, but certainly not the way it's implemented in Safari. If I want a decent feedreader, I get NetNewsWire.

Corentin

Or newsticker which does a different thing and "scrolls" the stories smoothly.

I better add this: I had my own ,rare, non reproducable 5.1 bugs which I believe totally my "OS X installation" problems.

As I didn't know 5.5 beta is accessible to people, I forced myself into Safari.

Now the point is: I lived the hassle to enable Safari debug menu just to DISABLE RSS support! Imagine a guy not having a single custom bookmark on Safari doing that. It irritated me that much.

A browsers RSS support should exactly be like Omniweb. Nothing more. The RSS support in Omniweb is great for sites updated twice a day or legaltorrents.com like sites which posts occasional updates.

If Omni Group invents a new thing for handling RSS, I won't be against it of course. (not speaking about where the RSS "sense" feature built into Safari comes from)

[Ronin]

I certainly hope that OmniWeb gets a better bookmarks interface. At present it is slow and not very user friendly. Unfortunately, it copies Safari et al instead of having a sidebar which enables much, much faster surfing. Too many mouse clicks.

[egrieco]

Another browser that no one has mentioned is Webstractor ( http://www.softchaos.com/products/webstractor/overview/ ). Truthfully it is more of a web research utility than a true browser. Would be great if OmniWeb had some of its capabilities. I hesitated posting the link though since many things I have been asking be fixed have been ignored for years.

Features/Bugs I have been requesting
- Better bookmark navigation when adding bookmarks.
- Delete empty tabs automatically when opening bookmarks in tabs.
- Close windows automatically when dragging all tabs out of the window.
- Use external download manager i.e. interarchy.
- Cache content for workspaces.
- Large forms take forever to submit.
- Show whether the site (and the current page specifically) has already been bookmarked in the location bar
- Have the option to view bookmarks sorted by host.
- Allow editing of cached pages (see Webstractor for details).

[Abhi Beckert]

Probably my absolute favorite feature in Safari is fast launch speed. *drool*

[neilio]

For me, the big, glaring issue with Omniweb (which Camino also suffers from) is the fact that it's not very easy to write plugins to extend it. I think an amazing start would be to somehow support inputmanagers that have been written for Safari, though I have absolutely no idea if this is completely impossible or not.

This is one of the major reasons why I keep reverting to Safari - for most things, it's Good Enough, and the fact that there are a good number of plugins to add functionality is the tipping point.

Of interest: I hacked the PithHelmet SIMBL plugin to see if I could get it to load in the Omniweb 5.5 beta and it worked, sort of. Obviously PithHelmet needs to be rewritten to fully support OW, but the fact that I could get it to load and sort of work is a good sign.

[Forrest]

Probably my absolute favorite feature in Safari is fast launch speed. *drool*

It's interesting to hear how other people use their software. Unless something odd happens, I launch OW about once per SP release. Most of my apps get launched about once per month or two.

[Abhi Beckert]

It's interesting to hear how other people use their software. Unless something odd happens, I launch OW about once per SP release. Most of my apps get launched about once per month or two.

I just counted the icons in my dock: 43. Every single one gets used daily, and I'm not exaggerating. I have a 12" screen and the tiny icon size drives me nuts, so every now and then I desperately go over the list in an attempt to remove items/get bigger icon size. There are also a ton of other apps I use once a week or so that I usually launch via spotlight (or quicksilver when I was running panther).

If I took your approach, I'd have an insane number of applications open at once, and that would mean I'd also have an insane number of icons in the command-tab panel, which is my primary method of switching apps. While working on some projects I switch apps extremely often (can be every two or three seconds), so I can't really have any more than 4 or 5 apps available without taking a huge productivity hit. I wish there was a cmd-tab tool that didn't show hidden apps, that'd be sweet!

So, while I certainly have enough ram to keep at least the general tools like web browsers open permanently, I rarely leave anything open.

[Forrest]

A 12" screen, ouch. My laptop is a 12". I know what you mean, especially since I like my dock on the right. I have 37 items currently in my dock, 27 are running. I use command+tab very often, but I guess I've gotten used to command+tab, command+shift+tab... and holding either down to quickly get to the app I want.

For me, I gladly trade the launch speed, even on my PB, for the added features that OW offers over Safari. That 2-3 second difference is quickly saved via OW's features.

[troyb]

Launch speed in OmniWeb is also affected by how many tabs you're loading and the history index, if you were to load into an empty workspace and removed your history index launch time should be pretty fast.

If you care to try setting aside your history index, just remove the history index files located in your "~/Library/Application Support/OmniWeb 5/" folder.

[gecko85]

I've been testing OmniWeb, and like many things about it (having a tab drawer on the side, instead of tabs across the top, is brilliant!)

I've also tested out Camino quite a bit, Opera, and several others.

For me, though, I keep coming back to Firefox because of the extensions. There are extensions that I've grown so accustomed to, that I can't seem to live without them anymore.

I guess since I have a 2GHz Intel iMac with 2GB RAM, I don't notice any speed issues that many people seem to complain about with Firefox on OSX.

Here are a few extensions that *for me* make Firefox my default browser:

* Tab Mix Plus: my new favorite extension. Not only does it offer a dizzying array of tab options (for example, letting you choose what happens when you close a tab: focus last selected, first, left, right...), it has a history of closed tabs that can be saved across sessions (off by default, but a great feature: if you accidently close a tab, you can get it back easily), but it also has a great session manager. You can select which session to restore when re-starting, and it saves crashed sessions as well.

* AdBlock: good stuff. Very configurable.

* TinyURL Creator: great context-menu plugin. I use this when sending URL's to friends via email, so that long URL's don't wrap.

* Google Toolbar for Firefox: not everyone likes it, but I love it. AutoLink, saved search history, spellcheck (will not be necessary with FF 2.0, which will have integrated as-you-type web form spell check just like Google Toolbar.)

* Web Developer Toolbar: awesome. Simply awesome.

Now, I'd LOVE to have a more "OS X native" app, like OmniWeb, and like I said, there are things I love about OmniWeb...I just wish it had a solid plugin architecture, with the developers to support it.