The Omni Group Releases OmniWeb 4.1 Final

by , 9:00 AM EDT, June 25th, 2002

The Omni Group has released the long-awaited final version of OmniWeb 4.1. The company has been working on version 4.1 in a series of publicly available releases for many months, and the final release includes a host of new features and improvements. OmniWeb 4.1 offers speed improvements, greatly enhanced support of CSS, and improved support for JavaScript. OmniWeb is a Cocoa built Web browser that takes full advantage of many Mac OS X technologies. From the Omni Group:

The Omni Group, developers of Mac OS X applications and game ports, announce the latest version of OmniWeb, the only web browser built specifically for Mac OS X. OmniWeb uses Mac OS X's graphics engine to produce great looking smooth text that looks like a printed page, takes full advantage of multiple processors for extra speed, and is truly designed around the Aqua user interface, with drawers, sheets, customizable toolbars and more.

OmniWeb provides a wide array of unique browsing features: the ability to disable JavaScript popup windows, flexible cookie preferences, bookmarks that can check themselves for updates, a source view window that can edit as well as display source, very customizable ad-filtering preferences, and a powerful feature called Shortcuts which lets you visit favorite web pages, do search engine queries, and other handy tasks using just a few keystrokes in the address bar. OmniWeb also has an intuitive History search that allows users to search their browsing history by text, rather than by URL or page title, and a built-in spell checker that works in all web forms.

"We've put a lot of thought into improving the way people interact with their web browsers, and I think it shows. In this point release we've greatly improved the downloads interface, added speech recognition, improved keyboard navigation - and, of course, made everything faster," said Ken Case, Chairman of The Omni Group and OmniWeb Lead Engineer. "Our users have been telling us that they love OmniWeb's interface and just wish it rendered every page they visit so they can use it 100% of the time, so most of our effort over the last year has been spent improving our support for plug-ins (including Flash 6), Java, CSS, and JavaScript. We haven't yet reached our ultimate compatibility goals for OmniWeb (such as complete support for all W3C-endorsed web standards), but in the last year we've made significant progress toward that end."

"OmniWeb has around half a million users right now, and this release is for them," added Wil Shipley, President of The Omni Group. "Our share of the browser market has been steadily increasing since Mac OS X started shipping, because OmniWeb is the only browser designed for Mac OS X exclusively. For example, OmniWeb uses sub-pixel positioning to render text, so web pages look like printed pages. Mac people notice the difference."

New Features since 4.0:

• Increased Compatibility:
• Greatly improved Java support
• Improved JavaScript support
• Improved CSS support
• 'Compatibility' settings which allow you to masquerade as a different web browser for gaining access to Web sites that restrict users based on browser
• Support for Netscape-style browser plugins including Macromedia's Flash 6 browser plugin.
• Many browser plugins, Flash included, perform better in OmniWeb than other browsers since we give them dedicated processing time

Easier to use

• Improved preferences interface
• Software Update built in which notifies you when new versions of OmniWeb are available
• 'Send Feedback' Item in Help menu allows user to easily send us feedback e-mail
• Integration with the Dock to display the number of updated bookmarks overlayed on the dock icon
• Improved downloads window

System Improvements

• Speech Recognition allows you to surf the web and perform many operations in OmniWeb using voice commands
• OmniWeb honors your System preferences for proxy servers
• OmniWeb ships localized into 17 languages; new to 4.1 is support for Greek, Icelandic, Korean, Portugese & Brazilian Portugese, and Russian
• OmniWeb now features support for AppleScript allowing users to script the application as well as providing support for third-party bookmark and history managers such as URL Manager Pro

OmniWeb 4.1 is a free update to registered users, while the full version is priced at US$29.95 for the full version. The Omni Group offers a free trial for the product, as well. You can find more information and download links for OmniWeb at the company's Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

OmniWeb is an outstanding browser, and the staff of TMO are big fans of the product. With the release of Mozilla 1.1a, OmniWeb has a real challenger for best Mac OS X browser, but the release of version 4.1 of OmniWeb goes far to make the challenge for Mozilla a tough one. That said, Mozilla and Internet Explorer are both faster browsers when it comes to rendering, but OmniWeb's formatting just plain makes Web pages look better. If you have never checked out OmniWeb, do so now. If you have checked out earlier versions and didn't like it, the changes and improvements in version 4.1 make it worth your time.

One of our favorite features in OmniWeb is the ability to use Mac OS X's built-in spell checking when using forms. That makes posting in forums, comments, and filling out other forms much easier if you care about such subtleties as misspellings.

The Omni Group