OmniWeb Wins Two OS X Apple Design Awards

by , 1:00 PM EDT, June 4th, 2001

The Omni Group's Cocoa based OS X Web browser, OmniWeb, was honored by winning two Apple Design Awards at the recent World Wide Developers Conference. Apple handed out for OS X based Design Awards, and OmniWeb took home the awards for "Best Mac OS X User Experience" and "Best New Mac OS X Product." According to The Omni Group:

At the 2001 Macintosh Worldwide Developers Conference, in front of a crowd of 2,000 engineers, Apple announced that OmniWeb won two of the four Apple Design Awards this year. The Omni engineers were all smiles as their native Mac OS X web browser, OmniWeb 4.0, won the awards for "Best Mac OS X User Experience" and "Best New Mac OS X Product."

OmniWeb's lead engineer, Ken Case, said "As we said in our 4.0 press release, OmniWeb is your browser, so this award really belongs to all of you: thank you all for your feedback, which has helped us turn OmniWeb into an award-winning product! (But I'm keeping the Cinema Display.)"

Omni's president, Wil Shipley, added "Writing OmniWeb has been incredibly fun because of all the positive feedback we've received from our users. Having Apple officially recognize us just makes it that much sweeter! (Also, Cinema Displays rule.) We're already planning what we're going to do to win again next year!"

Software was rated by a team of Apple engineers and designers using the criteria of "Ease of Use," "Use of Mac OS X Technologies," "Adherence to Aqua Interface Guidelines," and "Innovation." Various weighting factors were applied to these scores to determine the award winners in each category: "Most Innovative Mac OS X Product," "Best Mac OS X Technology Adoption," "Best Mac OS X User Experience," and "Best New Mac OS X Product." OmniWeb 4.0 won the latter two.

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

The Mac Observer Spin:

OmniWeb's rise in popularity is reminding some of the Browser Wars of the late 90's. Netscape was essentially responsible for bringing the World Wide Web to the masses and reigned as king until Microsoft's Internet Explorer wrestled the top spot away. OmniWeb is now positioned the same way IE was, but without Microsoft's unlimited budget.

There is currently an interesting thread in our forums on this very topic, and it seems many people agree that OmniWeb is going to give IE a run.

The Omni Group