OmniWeb 5.7 is weirdly like 1.0 version software.
 

OmniWeb 5.7 is weirdly like 1.0 version software. It's buggy, some features are just plain broken and boy do I see that spinning beachball a lot :-( I really regret having paid good money for it. I _REALLY_ regret not having tested it better before buying. Instead I took too much notice of it's positive reviews (which I'm now shaking my head over. Did you TEST OmniWeb at ALL MacWorld? Mac|Life?) and bought OmniWeb almost immediately. Very silly of me - I admit that.

Examples of my troubles: OmniWeb crashes every few hours, permission to use keychain entries are not remembered if another program originally created them, I'm asked if I want to save my passwords for webforms EVERY single time (regardless of whether I say yes or not), OmniWeb gets very slow with large numbers of tabs open (spinning beachball's are starting to invade my dreams - arrrgh!), form autofill of name, address, phone number, etc is very poor (99% of forms had to be completed manually even though their fields were clearly labelled "Phone", "Address", etc), changes to shared bookmarks are not always saved (and my iDisk has a local copy so that should NEVER happen, it's not having to save them across the net. Just to a LOCAL volume!) and no error message is given to warm me there has been a problem.

So I'm back using Camino nighty builds and MUCH happier. Camino might not be as pretty or nice to use - but it WORKS. OmniWeb simply doesn't far too frequently. It's a damn shame :-(

Hmm, I've been trying out OmniWeb 5.7 in my usual abusive fashion (would you believe 307 tabs at the moment, restarting the browser and reloading them causes 40+ MB of traffic to go through my primary interface). I've had a handful of crashes, but they've all been in the WebCore code, so I'm not sure Omni should get all the "credit" for those crashes. I do get the occasional beachball when I tell it to quit (which I usually only do when my machine runs out of disk space), but in most of those cases it resolves itself given a little time. The amount of bugginess or poor behavior I've encountered has been comparable to that on the other browsers I've used. I've been encountering and reporting considerably more bugs against OmniFocus 1.0x, so I don't agree with your claim that it is like version 1.0 software in that (or any other) regard. I'm still in the trial period for OmniWeb, and while I'm having a few problems here and there with the app, whether or not I spend the cash to buy it is going to depend almost entirely on whether or not the feature set grows on me enough that I'm willing to pay to keep it vs. using one of the several free alternatives. So far, it's looking like my preferred pizza vendor is going to sell one fewer pizza to me next month :-)

I trust you ARE sending in the crash reports, feedback on things that don't work but don't cause crashes, etc.? Have you tried the 5.8 sneaky peek to see if any of your issues go away?

I've reported all my troubles, yes. But I was never offered a newer version to try out. Are the keychain and shared bookmark bugs fixed in this 5.8 beta?

Regardless I find good web browsers such as Camino are not this buggy, and the time of having put up with web browsers being unstable and generally crap is well up! :-)

[QUOTE=Wizardling;38946]I've reported all my troubles, yes. But I was never offered a newer version to try out. Are the keychain and shared bookmark bugs fixed in this 5.8 beta?

Regardless I find good web browsers such as Camino are not this buggy, and the time of having put up with web browsers being unstable and generally crap is well up! :-)[/QUOTE]

[url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=8133[/url] has info on the sneaky peek track for OmniWeb 5.8. I have downloaded it, but not yet tried it, so I cannot comment on whether or not it fixes your issues (which I haven't encountered with 5.7). Even if I had, only you can really definitively answer the question of whether your issues are still present, right?

In any case, it sounds like you have a browser you prefer, and maybe the $15 outlay will save you money in the future, by causing you to look more critically at software recommended by Macworld, et al before plunking down the hard-earned cash :-)

The [URL="http://update.omnigroup.com/releasenotes/omniweb/OmniWeb-5.8-r101671-Alpha/"]release notes[/URL] for 5.8 SP series says:
"Saving a password to the keychain may not work"

And, that's the main reason I'm staying with Safari+Safaristand for now.

Is Camino that good now? Is it using the latest Gecko engine (the one in FF 3.0)?

Payam

[QUOTE=Wizardling;38946]I've reported all my troubles, yes. But I was never offered a newer version to try out. Are the keychain and shared bookmark bugs fixed in this 5.8 beta?

Regardless I find good web browsers such as Camino are not this buggy, and the time of having put up with web browsers being unstable and generally crap is well up! :-)[/QUOTE]

G'day philonous. I've found the [URL="http://caminobrowser.org/download/releases/nightly/"]Camino nightlies[/URL] to be rock solid compared to FF2 (can't comment much on FF3 yet), OmniWeb and Safari. I'm unsure as to exactly which version of Gecko the very latest Camino nightly builds are using, but I rarely encounter rendering errors.

Another option that's worth checking out IMO are the [URL="http://webkit.org/"]webkit nightlies.[/URL] I've been impressed by their stability and javascript rendering speed.

Pholonius - I'm sorry for the trouble you're having with OmniWeb - if you get in touch with [EMAIL="omniweb@omnigroup.com"]the support ninjas[/EMAIL], we can see if we can figure out what's going on here. With all that going on, being upset is certainly understandable! The number of hangs you're having is definitely out of the ordinary; the other issues, I should defer to the ninjas on - they know the lay of the land in re: OmniWeb better than I do.

If we can't get this straightened out, or if you're past the point of no return, we can also get you a refund, of course. If you're not happy with your purchase, we want to make that right.

[QUOTE=Wizardling;38943]OmniWeb 5.7 is weirdly like 1.0 version software. It's buggy, some features are just plain broken and boy do I see that spinning beachball a lot :-( I really regret having paid good money for it. I _REALLY_ regret not having tested it better before buying. Instead I took too much notice of it's positive reviews (which I'm now shaking my head over. Did you TEST OmniWeb at ALL MacWorld? Mac|Life?) and bought OmniWeb almost immediately. Very silly of me - I admit that.

Examples of my troubles: OmniWeb crashes every few hours, permission to use keychain entries are not remembered if another program originally created them, I'm asked if I want to save my passwords for webforms EVERY single time (regardless of whether I say yes or not), OmniWeb gets very slow with large numbers of tabs open (spinning beachball's are starting to invade my dreams - arrrgh!), form autofill of name, address, phone number, etc is very poor (99% of forms had to be completed manually even though their fields were clearly labelled "Phone", "Address", etc), changes to shared bookmarks are not always saved (and my iDisk has a local copy so that should NEVER happen, it's not having to save them across the net. Just to a LOCAL volume!) and no error message is given to warm me there has been a problem.

So I'm back using Camino nighty builds and MUCH happier. Camino might not be as pretty or nice to use - but it WORKS. OmniWeb simply doesn't far too frequently. It's a damn shame :-([/QUOTE]
Dude, don't use a Hackintosh you bought at Costco.

[QUOTE=frankiec;39002]Dude, don't use a Hackintosh you bought at Costco.[/QUOTE]

It would be appreciated by and benefit everyone here on the forums if we try to keep responses constructive. We want these forums to be a place for all users to feel comfortable asking questions or providing their views and this sort of response doesn't work towards that.

You're not the only one, OmniWeb crashes just about every time I try it, going back many versions. I don't know why that seems to be a minority experience, and there's nothing wrong with my MacBook. I'm afraid I've given up on it for the time being, I've found all of the major browsers to be much more stable.

Well, thanks for everyone's input. I've decided to wait till the next major version before trying OmniWeb again. I've requested and been granted a refund and cancelation of my license. Here's hoping v6 will be considerably improved.

I've been finding it unbearable lately, it simply has too many problems. There are sites that don't load well; it's SLOW, with 3GB ram it's just slow. Also, I can't drag a simple JPEG to the desktop because it appears as a html file. The find command is too annoying; Safari completely owns OW here and I hugely miss that feature. What's taking them so long?!

The window position bug keeps living forever and ever. No other browser on Earth has this fallacy.

OW can't hold being my default browser, I'm seriously thinking of switching to either Safari or FF. It's a huge pitty because OW has a nice and unique feature set, and it has elegance but it just doesn't deliver, it's outdated, it doesn't keep up, there is no passion.... where are the developers? It seems that it's just on life support mode.

What a pitty.

We understand that folks are frustrated, and we're certainly frustrated, as well. We devote as many resources to OmniWeb as we possibly can; if folks are unhappy, please contact the support ninjas with specifics of the problem and we'll do whatever we can to solve the issue.

Generic statements of 'it's slow', though, don't contain enough information to be of any assistance to us or to you. What site, vs. what browser? If you start both browsers into empty workspaces, what is the difference in page load times between the two?

And please don't think that we're not passionate about OmniWeb. That couldn't be farther from the truth.

[QUOTE=migueld;39279]Also, I can't drag a simple JPEG to the desktop because it appears as a html file.[/QUOTE]

If you can send an example page to the support ninjas, we can look into this. My guess is that the JPEG in question has a link attached - if I remember correctly OmniWeb gives preference to dragging the linked file in preference to the image. (Again, I'm guessing here. The ninjas would know better than I, and an example page would be helpful to them.)

If I *am* correct, the workaround would be to control-click the image, then select Image -> Download Image As... from the menu that appears.

[QUOTE=FredH;39067]APOO4
Association for the Promotion of OmniOutliner 4.0[/QUOTE]

I would like to join this organization. :)

[QUOTE=migueld;39279]It seems that it's just on life support mode.[/QUOTE]

I couldn't agree more with this, and everything else you said. I love Omni and I will always look forward to anything they're working on, but in its present state, to be blunt, OmniWeb is deteriorating into a real piece of crap.

It's insanely slow ... vs. EVERY browser, on EVERY page. Not because the renderer is slow, but because it slows down my entire computer, including itself, because it makes horrible use of memory, doesn't clean up after itself, and is generally very poorly optimized. I had to keep quitting it repeatedly throughout the day to reclaim all the wasted memory, but sadly this only partially mitigates the unacceptable amount of disk paging it causes.

Honestly, I couldn't keep using OmniWeb even if I wanted to. It simply wastes way too much of my time with beachball parties and futile struggles to regain control of my computer without having to endure 2-3 minute periods of disk grinding.

- PowerBook G4 (1.67 GHz), 1.5 GB RAM, 160 GB HD with > 20 GB free
- Mac OS X 10.5.3
- OmniWeb 5.8SP1 (this applies to all previous versions over the past couple years though)

I would look at the specs you've just posted for your computer and ask yourself whether that isn't a part of the problem ... why you're finding everything slow ... comparative lack of RAM using a version of an operating system that works best with lots of RAM; using a version of an operating system that apparently uses very frequent screen redraws on a computer without the graphics underpinning that it really expects; virtually no spare space on your hard disk ...

If Safari or others run faster for you, then well and good, use them. But it seems that a very large majority of us are happy with OW -- I for one -- and do not have the gripes that you do, have had about 5 forced shut-downs in a year at a guess, and I think three of those are the result of installing a plug-in that doesn't like the Apple Website ... so I use Safari for that. I don't notice OW being any slower than Safari, or Opera ...

I just don't think lashing out at Omni and intemperate language as has been being used recently -- not necessarily by you, I hasten to add -- helps anyone.

I agree, the speed of a browser depends of how we use it, configure it, our internet connection, traffic, computer configuration etc, etc……

[QUOTE=Brian;39328]If you can send an example page to the support ninjas, we can look into this. My guess is that the JPEG in question has a link attached - if I remember correctly OmniWeb gives preference to dragging the linked file in preference to the image. (Again, I'm guessing here. The ninjas would know better than I, and an example page would be helpful to them.)

If I *am* correct, the workaround would be to control-click the image, then select Image -> Download Image As... from the menu that appears.[/QUOTE]

This happens on several sites but the main one that I find a huge gripe is [url]www.gmail.com[/url]

View any JPG attachment, try to drag it to the desktop and it'll appear as a HTML file. Even "Download Image As..." doesn't work.

Both Safari and FF work fine; OW doesn't.

Ah what a breath of fresh air... I took the plunge and now Safari is my default browser.

Yes I'm already missing the vertical tabs but the performance is so fresh...

Wow; my experience with OW couldn't be farther from what some of you are going through. OW has been extremely stable for me. I'd say I have about 10 tabs open across three workspaces at any given time. Though I'm still on 10.4, so I can't speak to OW's performance under Leopard.

The only time OW beachballs is when I clear my History, but I think that has something to do with the Bloglines beta so I don't completely attribute that to OW. And I suppose the long-standing Netflix star rating problem is a nuisance, but the same thing happens with Safari on my iPhone, so again, something outside of OW is at play.

Here's hoping the support ninjas come through for everyone who's having stability issues...

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.