[BwanaZulia]

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

[JKT]

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.

[Cortig]

Originally Posted by BwanaZulia

Safari
- Good RSS feeds

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

[bethkatz17582]

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

[Ward]

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.

[BwanaZulia]

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

[Ilgaz]

Originally Posted by Cortig

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.

Corentin

Or newsticker which does a different thing and "scrolls" the stories smoothly.

I better add this: I had my own ,rare, non reproducable 5.1 bugs which I believe totally my "OS X installation" problems.

As I didn't know 5.5 beta is accessible to people, I forced myself into Safari.

Now the point is: I lived the hassle to enable Safari debug menu just to DISABLE RSS support! Imagine a guy not having a single custom bookmark on Safari doing that. It irritated me that much.

A browsers RSS support should exactly be like Omniweb. Nothing more. The RSS support in Omniweb is great for sites updated twice a day or legaltorrents.com like sites which posts occasional updates.

If Omni Group invents a new thing for handling RSS, I won't be against it of course. (not speaking about where the RSS "sense" feature built into Safari comes from)

I certainly hope that OmniWeb gets a better bookmarks interface. At present it is slow and not very user friendly. Unfortunately, it copies Safari et al instead of having a sidebar which enables much, much faster surfing. Too many mouse clicks.

Another browser that no one has mentioned is Webstractor ( http://www.softchaos.com/products/webstractor/overview/ ). Truthfully it is more of a web research utility than a true browser. Would be great if OmniWeb had some of its capabilities. I hesitated posting the link though since many things I have been asking be fixed have been ignored for years.

Features/Bugs I have been requesting
- Better bookmark navigation when adding bookmarks.
- Delete empty tabs automatically when opening bookmarks in tabs.
- Close windows automatically when dragging all tabs out of the window.
- Use external download manager i.e. interarchy.
- Cache content for workspaces.
- Large forms take forever to submit.
- Show whether the site (and the current page specifically) has already been bookmarked in the location bar
- Have the option to view bookmarks sorted by host.
- Allow editing of cached pages (see Webstractor for details).

[Abhi Beckert]

Probably my absolute favorite feature in Safari is fast launch speed. *drool*