OS X Browser Adds CSS Support

by , 11:15 AM EST, December 29th, 2000

The Omni Group has released a new beta version of their OS X only web browser, OmniWeb. OmniWeb is the only browser for OS X written using Apple's Cocoa framework (others are Carbonized), and offers a full range of powerful features. 4.0b8 includes support for Cascading Style Sheets, and while this support is not fully implemented, most pages render well with the new CSS engine. According to The Omni Group:

Highlights of 4.0b8:

• We now automatically abort orphaned tasks. What this means is that if you click on a link on a page before the page has finished loading, we don't bother to finish loading the page. This should make subsequent pages load more quickly for those on slow links.
• Remade the preferences panel in the fashion of Apple's system preferences app.
• We now use your preferred Mail and News applications (as defined by InternetConfig) when opening mailto and news URLs.
• Bookmarks now show up in the bookmarks menu without you having to reset the corresponding preference every time you launch OmniWeb.
• When adding bookmarks, they no longer simply show empty labels.
• Fixed the "Open URL" Service.
• If the server returns HTTP_STATUS_REQUEST_TIMEOUT, retry rather than failing. (This fixes the squid proxy server timeout bug.)
• Numerous bug fixes. Also, various improvements to our CSS and JavaScript support.

Bug Fixes:

• Update the loading status indicators from the main thread to avoid some thread-safety issues.
• Fixed the "Open URL" Service.
• A WebSitePro/2.4.9 server at www.alpa.org was returning \r\r\n in some of its headers, so let's go ahead and allow that as an end-of-line sequence (since obviously it works in other browsers) rather than returning an empty line between \r and \r\n, signalling the end of the HTTP headers (and thus not interpreting subsequent headers).
• If the content type guesser incorrectly typed some data as gif or jpeg, we used to go into an infinite loop because the gif and jpeg processors didn't check the return value on -[OWDataStream resetContentTypeAndEncoding] (which returns NO if the content type has already been reset once).
• Many more...

OmniWeb is designed to provide you with the best user experience you'll find in a web browser. We think it's important to polish every user interaction to make sure that the browser acts the way you want it to so you can stop thinking about the application you're using and just get at the information you want, quickly.

We've concentrated on things like making bookmarks extremely easy to use (we were the first browser to allow you to simply drag a page to and from your bookmarks) and having them automatically check themselves for new content. But our focus goes beyond the big features, to include little details like having keyboard shortcuts for finding forward and backward (and automatically wrapping around), shrink-to-fit window zooms and (of course!) a fully "Aquafied" user interface. (Our Aqua support is not just skin deep: we have slide-out bookmark and history "drawers", and not only do we use native Aqua interface elements for display on web pages, we even make the default submit button in a form throb just like it would if it were the default button on a native panel, so you know what will happen when you hit return.)

Of course, none of this matters unless OmniWeb is able to view the pages you want to see. That's why we include support for JavaScript, Flash, Layers, and SSL; and for the final release of OmniWeb 4 we plan to include full support for Cascading Style Sheets, and Java applets.

OmniWeb is available for free, but users are encouraged to license the product for US$29.95 if they find it useful (think shareware). You can find more information at The Omni Group's web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Several Mac Observer staff members use OmniWeb on a regular basis, and this update is much welcomed. While CSS support is not perfect, most CSS based pages render perfectly. OmniWeb is still not as fast as iCab, but now with CSS support it certainly does deserve a look from the OS X users out there.

The Omni Group