The Competition...
 

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

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.

[QUOTE=BwanaZulia]Safari
- Good RSS feeds[/QUOTE]

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

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

+ Search Shortcuts
 

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.

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

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

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.

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

Another browser to add to the discussion:

[url=http://www.irider.com/irider/index.htm]iRider[/url] 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)