Mac OS X - OS X Alternate Web Browser Udated

by , 10:00 AM EDT, September 29th, 2000

The Omni Group has updated their popular OS X web browser, OmniWeb, to version 4.0b6. The latest incarnation of the Cocoa-built OmniWeb promises greatly improved stability, and the ability to import bookmarks from Netscape and IE. According to the Omni Group:

Beta 6 of OmniWeb 4 has been released. OmniWeb is a native web browser for Mac OS X, written in Objective-C with Apple's advanced Cocoa frameworks.

This release has a number of enhancements and bug fixes. Most importantly, it is appreciably more stable than beta 5. Also, there is initial support for importing IE and Netscape bookmarks (copy your existing bookmarks file over OmniWeb's bookmarks and OmniWeb will convert them when you launch the app); CSS fonts are scaled to 72 dpi and thus are now much more readable; and the distribution is available as a disk image rather than an Installer package. Full release notes are available from http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omniweb/releasenotes/.

Beta 6 does have a bug identified shortly after release, where the JavaScript window opening preference is reversed - in order for JavaScript popup windows to work, you will need to bring up OmniWeb's preferences panel, select the JavaScript preferences, and set the window opening preference to "not allowed" or "allowed in response to user action."

If you have previously installed beta 5 using Apple's Installer application, in order to uninstall it you will need to log in as the administrator. This is done by logging in with the name "root" and the password that you gave when you installed Mac OS X. Then drag OmniWeb to the trash, drag the OmniWeb package receipt (from the /Library/Receipts folder) to the trash, then empty the trash. Then you can log out, log back in with your normal account and install the new release.

Note that if you attempt to install from the disk image by double-clicking on the disk image and the Classic environment is running that the Classic environment may mount the disk image and you won't be ablee to access it. It is recommended that you shut down the Classic environment before attempting to mount the disk image.

The beta of OmniWeb is currently available for free, and pricing for the final version has yet to be decided. You can find more information at the Omni Group web site.

The Omni Group