[JKT]

Originally Posted by Drayon

1 man has accomplished more in 6 months than OW has in 2 years.

To be fair, iCab's development stagnated for 7 years prior to the latest release, which is missing many of the features that made the OS 9 version so good. It's very good that development is moving again, but I would be cautious about using it as a paradigm of rapid app development ;)

[Handycam]

Originally Posted by Drayon

This is so true. Here is but one example load your home page in FF3 which does not show the key command in the in the menu's Function+Option+Left Arrow

Option-Home goes to your home page in FF3.

Oh, and it's a real home page, not a "start page". You can have new windows open empty AND have a page you can get to when clicking "home". This is a common feature -- except on OW. I requested this ages ago, it was added to the list, and like many ideas suggested here by most of us, there it sits.

[Drayon]

Originally Posted by Handycam

Option-Home goes to your home page in FF3.

Oh, and it's a real home page, not a "start page". You can have new windows open empty AND have a page you can get to when clicking "home". This is a common feature -- except on OW. I requested this ages ago, it was added to the list, and like many ideas suggested here by most of us, there it sits.

Maybe on a desktop but on a Powerbook it is as i said, function+option+home. option+home does not work.

At first i had a problem with the home page/start page thing. Now i have no issue an actually prefer OW's usage to any thing else. I set the start page to be blank, i set up my home page as a favorite at the top of the list so it uses key stroke command+1. I find this much faster and easier than the to handed command+shift+home.

Of the top of my head i think my only major outstanding issue to be acknowledged and provided attention is the url auto complete function. I know some here love to disagree but the current implementation is a major problem for me. I want a setting to change the filtering hierarchy. If i type 'appleins" i expect 'appleinsider.com' to be at the top of the list. The list shows 'forums.appleinsider.com'. If i wanted 'forums.appleinsider.com' ill type,'forums.ap'.

[Handycam]

Originally Posted by Drayon

Of the top of my head i think my only major outstanding issue to be acknowledged and provided attention is the url auto complete function. I know some here love to disagree but the current implementation is a major problem for me. I want a setting to change the filtering hierarchy. If i type 'appleins" i expect 'appleinsider.com' to be at the top of the list. The list shows 'forums.appleinsider.com'. If i wanted 'forums.appleinsider.com' ill type,'forums.ap'.

To be honest, I like the current implementation... I always liked that I didnt need to remember how the url started, only part of it or part of the page title.

FF3 has a good compromise: it works like OW but then remembers which you chose and next time that's at the top. I'd like to see some more thought go into this.

[Handycam]

OK, I have to admit that the latest build is an improvement.

I still prefer OW/Safari over Gecko, since I think WebKit has nicer rendering. And the site prefs. I hope some of the long-standing peeves I and others have stated get addressed soon, though.

[frankiec]

Originally Posted by Handycam

I care about those things. That excuse used to hold water, but FF3 is very mac-like, especially compared to 2.

FF3 is not very Mac-like at all. You can read some of the reasons "Firefox 3’s shortcomings as a Mac app" fall short.
http://daringfireball.net/2008/04/firefox_3_safari_3

Originally Posted by Handycam

Also, the Mac experience has also meant being at the vanguard of user experience, and being able to customize this experience. In that respect FF now has the edge over OW.

Huh? This line of reasoning makes no sense.

Customization = Mac so Firefox = better than OW ???

If customizing the user experience meant anything then GNU/Linux is more Mac than Mac.

Originally Posted by Handycam

Also, the only things I see in OW at this point I can't get as nice in FF are Workspaces and Site Prefs. And I can work around it.

I'm not trying to start a flame war, either. I love OW. I'd love to see 5.8 finished and the 6.0 cycle start, and to see 6.0 with the kind of features that would make OW worth it again.

I'm not trying to start a flame war either, but it's just wrong to say that Firefox is more Mac-like because of the interface or because of customization.

Firefox does not behave like a native, proper real Mac application. It may look like one, but to the experienced, savvy user it shows. Firefox is a port and will always be a port.

This is getting old.

[NeoX360]

Originally Posted by frankiec

FF3 is not very Mac-like at all. You can read some of the reasons "Firefox 3’s shortcomings as a Mac app" fall short.
http://daringfireball.net/2008/04/firefox_3_safari_3



Huh? This line of reasoning makes no sense.

Customization = Mac so Firefox = better than OW ???

If customizing the user experience meant anything then GNU/Linux is more Mac than Mac.



I'm not trying to start a flame war either, but it's just wrong to say that Firefox is more Mac-like because of the interface or because of customization.

Firefox does not behave like a native, proper real Mac application. It may look like one, but to the experienced, savvy user it shows. Firefox is a port and will always be a port.

This is getting old.

I have to agree with the others, saying FF 3 is more mac like then OW is laughable. OW is far and away one of the best browsers on the Mac. I have been an OW user since 4 and have seen many cool things come through. For the last couple of years I have still maintained Safari as my default browser because I like a couple of the features, particularly the find feature. But Safari also requires more maint. then most browsers too as it tends to slow down, and beachball and all together crash far to frequently for my tastes. It is to the point that OW is now once again, my default browser.

The features in OW are tough to match. Site prefs, Workspaces, Page Marking, and oh so many other cool and unique features that yeah you can get some of these with FF and Extensions, but what a mess that is. It is bloated, not based on Cocoa or Carbon, for that matter, and does not behave like a standard Mac app. Although I will admit that FF3 is much better then FF2 in this regard, I still prefer OW, heck even Camino has FF3 beat in my book.

Hopefully Omni is working on 6 and I will not hesitate to upgrade. Each version has been significantly better then the last.

[arglborps]

I, too think that's the main reason that keeps me going back to OW, because it's a real Cocoa Mac OS X "citizen". FF is more Mac like than ever, but that really doesn't mean all that much considering how totally alien it felt in versions before 3.

[Drayon]

Originally Posted by Handycam

To be honest, I like the current implementation... I always liked that I didnt need to remember how the url started, only part of it or part of the page title.

That is strange. I practically know nearly every URL I have in my bookmarks probably 200. Im not at all suggesting this system should be abandoned. My request it to have a setting to alter the order of relevance to be returned first. I'd like a simple function to return TopLevelDomains then SubDomains THEN the million urls. Logically, there is only 1 TLD url, potentially a few SubDomains and potentially thousands of urls in history accessed from these domains.

EG: If I type "apple" id like returned
apple.com
developer.apple.com
discussions.apple.com
support.apple.com

then return the million pages for each TLD then SubDomain
eg
apple.com/mac/
apple.com/mac/macbookpro/

developer.apple.com/audio/
developer.apple.com/audio/coreaudio.html

This way the TLD that you may want is NOT down the very bottom of the list of 1 million urls that have apple in them. Simply, if you really only want developer.apple.com or the pages on that Sub Domain you just type "devel". Surely that is not hard to remember? Currently, if I type "applein" or even "insid" it should be clear I want appleinsider.com first then perhaps forums.appleinsider, but no, it returns a Sub Domain first "forums.appleinsider.com" and a million of the forum's urls (if i have a million visited in history) dropping the TLD I actually want "appleinsider.com" down the bottom of the list. I can't see how anyone can see the sanity in this, it defeats the usefulness of the feature because it would actually be faster have to manually type out the full url (if known) or access it via the bookmarks.

None of this should have any relevance if someone wanted to return a list of urls based on page title. Why? Because as you say, most likely you wont know the url or even the site, so you will only be typing keywords you remember based on page titles. For your example, if you wanted to find that page in history you visited earlier lets use : "snow leopard", you'd type "snow" or "snow l". Currently, and IMO, correctly returns all the urls in alphabetical a-z that have page titles containing "snow leopard".

As you can see Im not suggesting url auto completion using page title or part thereof be removed. As you now see this method of filtering is based from a different line of data entry which is in contrast to entering data based on a known url.

The most comprehensive feature set I have seen is Nikitas Liogka's Autocomplete Manager:

http://www.leogas.net/acmanager/#features
http://www.leogas.net/acmanager/snapshots.html

Im not suggesting OW should offer this level of configurability however.