OmniWeb 4.0 Released

by , 9:30 AM EST, March 24th, 2001

In conjunction with today's official release of OS X, the good folks at The Omni Group have announced that their full-featured, Cocoa based Web browser, OmniWeb 4.0, has also been released. OmniWeb 4.0 offers users a wide array of standards compliant features, such as JavaScript, CSS, QuickTime, and Flash support. OmniWeb also takes full advantage of OS X's Quartz imaging technology to produce extremely clear pages. According to The Omni Group:

The Omni Group today released OmniWeb 4.0 for Mac OS X. This groundbreaking web browser was written entirely in the advanced object oriented programming framework, called Cocoa, and leverages many of the core technologies and strengths of Mac OS X for an incredible user experience.

"We're extremely proud of OmniWeb," said Wil Shipley, President of Omni. "And as long-time advocates of the benefits of Cocoa, we are excited to finally unveil OmniWeb for Apple's ultramodern operating system - Mac OS X."

"With state-of-the-art technologies, such as the stunning 'Aqua' interface and a new Quartz 2D graphics engine, Mac OS X is truly the world's most advanced operating system," said Clent Richardson, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "OmniWeb represents a considerable amount of effort, and we are thrilled that Omni Group is taking advantage of all that Mac OS X offers to developers."

OmniWeb 4.0 is a fast, clean, standards-compliant browser, with built-in support for HTML 4.0, JavaScript (aka ECM script), Java 2, QuickTime, Flash, Cascading Style Sheets level 1, CSS-P, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), HTTP/1.1, UNICODE, and non-English languages, as well as support for Mac OS X technologies like Keychain, AppleScript, ColorSync, symmetric multiprocessing, and multithreading. The new user interface was designed specifically for Aqua including Aqua-standard preferences, customizable toolbars, sheets, and drawers. OmniWeb is also the only browser on any platform that uses multiple OS-level threads to take full advantage of multiprocessing machines. Yet perhaps the best features is the superb text rendering of web pages in OmniWeb 4.0 - making even very tiny text easy to read, thanks to the way the program uses Mac OS X's Quartz display graphics engine.

"Our first version of OmniWeb pioneered many firsts for web browsers," continued Mr. Shipley. "And that was in 1993, long before Netscape incorporated or before SpyGlass sold Internet Explorer to Microsoft. Over the years, we've been proud to introduce many of the ideas that are now considered standard components of web browsers - including draggable links and draggable, hierarchical bookmarks. And we're introducing many new features with this version."

With this 4.0 release, OmniWeb is the first browser on any platform to remember values in forms simply by bookmarking their pages, to allow full-text searches through pages you've recently visited, and to store network passwords in a secure Keychain. Of course, OmniWeb also has adopted the best features of browsers on other platforms, including blocking suspected ads and allowing users to block being tracked with cookies on a site-by-site basis.

OmniWeb will prove to be a boon to HTML editors, and JavaScript coder as well. With OmniWeb the user can view the source for any webpage, then edit and redisplay that page as if it had been changed on the remote site. As such, it can also be used as as a primary HTML editor and upload changed pages to remote webservers with a single click. OmniWeb's built-in source editor offers on-the-fly syntax coloring while the user types, so incorrectly formed HTML is immediately flagged, and HTML can even be instantly reformatted to make it more readable. Finally, OmniWeb contains a full JavaScript debugging console, that even allows one to view a page after it has been modified by JavaScript, so authors can see the output of JavaScript code as it executes.

OmniWeb is available as shareware for US$29.95. You can find more information at The Omni Group's Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Woohoo! OmniWeb is a pleasure to use, and rendered Web pages are gorgeous to look at. We had hoped that 4.0 would be released shortly after OS X's official release, but this is a pleasant surprise. If you are making the switch to OS X, OmniWeb is definitely worth a look.

The Omni Group