OmniWeb 23 comments

26 Apr 2007 @ 15:56, by Flemming Funch Earlier I was lamenting my lack of success in having a browser that works for me on my Mac. But I hadn't seriously tried OmniWeb, and it was sort of the only remaining browser after Firefox, Opera and Safari. I hadn't given it much attention, because it is the lesser known, and it isn't free. Only $14.95, which is perfectly alright, but that was enough of an obstacle that I hadn't seriously tried it. And, as it turns out, OmniWeb is the only browser that solves my showstopping problems. Mainly that if I use the other browsers the way that comes naturally to me, at the end of the day my machine would have slowed to a grinding halt, and I see the spinning beachball for several seconds no matter what I push. There are other things that are nice to have, but that in itself far outweighs all the other concerns. Part of the secret is that OmniWeb has several separate Workspaces. That is, one can have collections of windows and tabs, and they're kept separate from one another. So, I can have 30 sites open without them all showing at the same time and the one with bad javascript slowing everything down. I see just the windows and tabs I'm working on. When I switch out of a workspace, it still keeps running for an hour or so, so if I went back to it, it would be there instantly. If it is longer than an hour, it would need to load the pages again, but everything would still come back like I left it, rather quickly. After two weeks of using it, I haven't had that slowdown experience at all. So, they must be doing something right in terms of managing resources. OmniWeb has a system of "tabs" which aren't like tabs in the other browsers. Not little folder tabs along the top. Rather, they're small snapshots showing in a sidebar to the left. Which is a bit odd as far as tabs go, but it actually works very well. There'd still be a bunch of things I'd miss from FireFox, like the FireBug javascript debugger, and various other plugins and add-ons for dealing with pictures, showing Google PageRank and things like that. But the other thing that really irritated me with Firefox - that a download of any file would take 10 seconds to start, freezing all activity in the meantime - no problem like that in OmniWeb. Opera and Safari don't have that problem either. OmniWeb uses the same engine for rendering pages as Safari, the built-in Apple WebKit, which seems to work fine.

23 comments

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