Ow 5.8
 

I have a Macbook Pro with 3 GB RAM, 2.16 GHz processor and I find OW 5.8 to be reasonably fast.

I guess I equate browsers with athletes - FF does the decathalon (jack of all trades, master of none); Safari can run the 100 m very fast (but cant throw a shotput or run the 800m); and OW fits somewhere in between these two (pretty fast, OK on memory, does quite a lot).

The issues with Google stuff (mail, docs, reader) are an 800 lb gorilla in the room who will only get bigger. This must be dealt with.

Using current Webkits increases speed, which is nice.

I really DO like the look of the buttons and the fonts of FF 3.x, though - much more Safari-like.

I have been using FF3 moslty now. I try to use OW. but I get tired of the slow page loads.

I like the text rendering in OW better, although gecko in 3.0 is almost the same at this point. The newer browser chrome in 3 is much more mac-like than before. And the "awesome bar" is far superior to OW.

It seems like a lot of thing that OW originally pioneered, that made it special, have been appropriated by now by the other browsers. And, unfortunately, Omni didn't keep innovating to stay ahead.

I would hope that 6.0 is not a whole year away, otherwise don't bother. Who will be left by then to use it, if the loyal user base is drifting off to other browsers? I would hope that 6.0 can offer something more than just a slick browser; perhaps it could have web development tools and become the Safari for developers. Or even stuff I personally don't care about but might attract people: blogging tools, social networking, automation, intelligence.

As it stands now, there's no reason to use 5.8 really. And that makes me sad.