[Handycam]

To be honest, I seriously doubt we'll ever see a 6.0 of OW. Unless they've got some major re-thinking of a browser planned, there seems to be no reason. OW can't be making much money for Omni anymore. The lower price coupled by the improvements in recent Safari and other browsers makes the rationale for OW even smaller than it was before.

One would assume that a great many new Mac users will used one of the excellent free alternatives before paying for a browser. Especially one with a great many bugs and with which many of its differentiating features work poorly or not at all -- when the free browsers have many alternative ways of adding the same features (often times in a much better way).

IMHO, OW for a daily browser for "regular" web users is a weak proposition, when every Mac comes with Safari -- which offers an excellent experience for newbies and power-user features with a few tweaks and add-ons. Real "power" users and developers (like me) with want to use Firefox anyway, or perhaps Opera. Those who don't like Safari, like Gecko, but not FF will use Camino.

So why would OW expend resources into a such an apparent losing proposition? There is a core of long-time users, many of whom (like me) paid full price. But we're not going to provide an ongoing revenue stream, unless they charge for 6.0 and it offers enough to entice us to update. It just might not be worth it for them, and the glacial pace of updates since 5.0/5.5 is an indication. OW rarely uses the latest WebKit, or even the one available in Safari, and even when it's close there are still bugs that are not in WK or Safari -- so why not just use Safari?

What, if anything can be done? I would think (hope?) that if Omni is going to work on 6.0 (and 5.8, 5.9 are a waste of time) they might work on a strong UI and feature set that would position OW as a "power-user's Safari." Things like excellent autofill, data detectors, more integration with other apps and Leopard technologies. As a web developer, I'd pay for a considerably enhanced Web Inspector, integrated JS and/or PHP debuggers, comprehensive source/DOM view (a nicer Firebug?), maybe blogging tools built in, mouse gestures, better/easier ad blocking etc etc. My point is parity won't cut it any more -- not for the customers, and not really for Omni. To have a product with a solid value proposition, they need to leapfrog what's out there -- and keep it current, reliable, and compliant.