[WebJIVE]

OW is a great browser but, there are a few things that hold me back from buying it. I can list them out and I know there are workarounds for almost all of them and I, like a lot of people don't want to manage 2 or more apps to do some of these tasks that can be accomplished in Safari or Firefox. Just my idea of the ideal OW browser. (BTW, I personally like native OSX apps which is why I don't run Firefox as my primary browser. It doesn't look, feel or operate like a native app)

I think 1 and 2 are my priorities. 3 and 4 are icing on the cake IMHO.

1. Built in RSS reader, not the headline listing built into the bookmarks manager. Safari has what I consider the baseline/usable RSS news reader. I'm hooked on it. If you could just match Safari's functionality, I think you would hit the mark for a large percentage of people. The power user will continue to use more robust RSS readers but good enough is what 95% of the users are really wanting. Also, the site watch feature rocks and should stay IMHO.

2. Either beef up the ad blocking or enable OW to use Safari Block (my favorite because it has excellent Flash ad blocking capabilities) or Pithhelmet. If the cost of developing this further to at least match Safari Block is not worth it, support it as a plugin. Problem solved.. :-) The Flash ads are causing the most pain these days and providing people a list of blockable elements in the site preferences is asking people to become sudo web devs. I develop sites for a living and I hate having to dig through elements to find the right thing to block.

3. For the web devs out there, supporting plugins like Webdev additions for Safari or building equivalent functionality would be icing on the cake. I can get this now with the Web Developer Additions v. 1.0b18.1 by Les Nie bolted onto Safari. Firefox also has a very robust addon for this.

4. SIMBL plugin support. This would add a lot of addon capabilities to OW and open the door for 3rd party developers. If not SIMBL, then open OW up to plugins via an SDK or something. This would allow the 1000's of devs out there to get creative.

Regards,
Eric Caldwell