Living Without Safari Week 2: OmniWeb
Living Without Safari Week 2: OmniWeb
by , 9:00 AM EDT, March 14th, 2007
Spending a week without Safari and exclusively in a different Web browser is kind of like visiting someplace you've never been before - you never know what surprises are waiting around the next corner. Lucky for me, the surprises waiting in OmniWeb town were happy and nice and kick-in-the-shins free.
Last week I used only Firefox, and this week, it's OmniWeb. Next week is Opera, and thanks to the overwhelming number or requests for Camino, that's now on my list, too.
Week 2: OmniWeb 5.5.4
OmniWeb from The Omni Group is about the only Web browser for the Mac that you have to pay for. It costs US$14.95, and it is available as a download from The Omni Group's Web site.
If you are interested in seeing what else I have to say about OmniWeb, check out my review from January.
 The Omni Group's OmniWeb |
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Impressions Like Safari and Firefox, OmniWeb sports tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking which are essential features when I'm surfing the Web. The tabs in OmniWeb, however, offer a unique twist: They all sit in a drawer off the side of the application window, and each site is represented by a live-updating thumbnail.
It's amazingly easy to keep track of several Web sites through the thumbnails. Every time a site is updated with new information, OmniWeb adds a green check to its thumbnail as a visual queue to the changes.
The thumbnail drawer works great - unless you have lots of Web pages open. I may have 20 or more pages open at any time, which is just way too many to keep track of with thumbnail images. Sure, you can scroll through the list, but I found that to be cumbersome and at times it was difficult to find just the tab I wanted.
After I switched to the name-only view for tabs, it was much easier for me to find exactly the one I wanted. Hovering over a tab revealed the full site name and URL, which was handy when a site name was cut off. I also appreciated that I could reorder tabs by dragging them, just as you can in Firefox. Sadly, this feature is missing from Safari.
One feature I would love to see in OmniWeb is the ability to color code tabs. That would add a great visual reference to help organize the slew of tabs I keep open. For example, I would use one color to denote the administrative sites I use for The Mac Observer and iPodObserver.com. Another color would signify other sites I reference throughout the day, like Apple, Adobe, and Quark. Personal sites for friends and colleagues would get their own color, too.
Keyboard shortcuts were easy to use, and didn't require me to click first and then invoke a shortcut. I'm all about saving time and being efficient when I'm at my Mac, and I really felt like OmniWeb helped me out instead of getting in my way.
I had no qualms with Web page rendering times, and OmniWeb was stable all week long. OmniWeb also had that "made for a Mac" fluid feel that Firefox was lacking. Actually, I'll go so far as to say OmniWeb felt more Mac-like to me than Safari.
Processor usage was reasonable, too. When in the background, OmniWeb usually dropped to zero CPU usage, and rarely jumped over 10 percent when it was the foreground application.
Web site compatibility wasn't an issue for me. Every site I use opened and rendered correctly, and even a couple of sites that render incorrectly in Safari look right in OmniWeb.
I'm not, however, a big fan of OmniWeb's site marking feature. In OmniWeb, you can mark any page and then jump back to it later. Safari's snap-back feature automatically marks pages for you, and is smart enough to jump back to the last page you were viewing in a Google search - a much better implementation.
Other notable features: OmniWeb has a fantastic built-in spell checking feature that proved itself over and again when I was filling out online forms and writing in online forums. It also includes a "workspace" feature that lets you build custom browser window sets that include tabs pre-loaded with specific sites, and the ability to set per-site preferences. You can, for example, increase the type size on a site that displays text at an insanely small size, and OmniWeb will dutifully bump up the type size every time you return to that page.
The Verdict OmniWeb takes all the Web browser-y goodness I want in an application and rolls it into one neat little package. It is easy on your Mac's processor, renders quickly and reliably, and it has the feel of a well-designed application coded by people that get what the Mac and Mac OS X are all about.
The tabs-in-a-drawer feature is much more usable than any other browser tab implementation I've tried so far, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is the best implementation out there. Like peas and carrots, some people prefer the flavor while others don't. Some people prefer the more traditional-style tabbed interface that Safari and Firefox offer. Call me a peas and carrots kind of guy - I just happen to like it.
OmniWeb does pretty much everything I need in a Web browser - save for the tab color labels and not-to-my-liking implementation of the site marking feature. As of now, I am seriously considering dumping Safari in favor of OmniWeb. Really.
Next week: Opera
Interested in the other Web browsers in the Living Without Safari series? Here you go:
Observer Comments
Wed Mar 14, 2007 9:56 am Subject: I really hate Safari
I find Safari to be horribly slow. I keep trying different browsers, most recently Opera, but I always keep coming back to Firefox.
I can't live without several Firefox extensions, especially Google Browser Sync, which syncs not only bookmarks, but cookies, passwords, and open cookies & tabs between my computers. I haven't found that functionality in any other browser, which is what always brings me back to Firefox.
I've been using OmniWeb since early v4. It's the best browser on OS X. And yes, I paid for it, and no, I don't work for OG.
Despite its "features", Firefox is... well... awful. It's awkward, clunky, the UI is terrible, and such an obvious Windows port. You have to search for and install at least half a dozen extensions to Firefox to make it do what OW does. Camino is buggy and slow since it was switched to the same rendering engine.
One thing overlooked in this review is that OW has a nice little built in text editing window for posting comments like this. Just click the little + sign in the upper right hand corner of the window, and viola, a separate dedicated resizable window for text editing pops up that you can use just like TextEdit.
Overall, nothing better out there for the Mac than OW. Firefox is the best browser for Windows, but well... it's Windows, so that's not saying much.
One of this big things that OmniWeb does not support properly is Keychain Access:
1. It cannot handle two username/password combinations for the same site (Safari can).
2. It cannot handle any changes to any of the fields in Keychain; if you rename the 'Name' field in Keychain Access, OmniWeb will not recognise the username and password for that site any more.
There are a lot of little, everyday features that Safari has which other browsers lack.
Standard Firefox on Mac is not great, however about 4 months ago I started using a optimized version of Firefox for Mac
You can find it here.
http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2007/02/24/firefox-2002
I like to see what the author of this article thought of it.
Gavin 
I understand Safari has a 1 second delay per page? Someone told me that once. Anyway, this application removes it:
http://www.scifience.net/safarispeed/
Not only can you drag around those "tab" thumbnails within a window, but you can drag them between windows. Have a tab you want in its own window? double-click its thumbnail, and it opens a new window. This is great for when you open a site, and decide you want to open new tabs from that site, but you don't want to clutter up your other window with even more tags. Open in a new window, and start "tabbing". Say you want that page back in its previous window? Simply drag its tab thumbnail back to the original window.
What if you want to open a new tab, but not at the bottom of the list? Easy, simply drag its link from the web page to where you want it in the drawer, and it will open there. Suppose you would like to replace the contents of a tab with a link in the current window--same thing, only drag it on top of the already-existing tab.
Omni is tabbed browsing on steroids. It ought to be illegal. 
As to the complaints about Omni and keychain access--I have yet to personally notice any issues with the keychain, and I had multiples of items in my keychain long before I got Omni--Safari created them all! It made a mess of my keychain, so I doubt Omni can be much worse.
Oh, and Omni has _awesome_ ad blocking power, as well as site-specific security features for graphics, cookies, popup windows, look, etc.
My only complaint is that it crashes on my computer far too often, and only when certain graphic-intensive, Cocoa-based apps open, so I think it's video memory-related, and due to my ancient Pismo with a mere 8meg of video ram... But since Omni remembers all my windows and tabs, it's a simple matter of relaunching, and moving onward--another plus of Omni over most other browsers...
-Jon
(another satisfied customer)
Wed Mar 14, 2007 5:16 pm Subject: Best for me, but...
Wed Mar 14, 2007 6:58 pm Subject: Other OmniWeb goodies
There are a bunch of OW feature that I use every day and make it, for me, completely the stand out browser, bar none.
- Workspaces. For regular daily browsing and for work-in-progress, workspaces are a stand out feature.
- Per-site preferences
- Zoom text boxes
- Wickedly configurable shortcuts
- Wickedly configurable ad blocking
Thu Mar 15, 2007 1:20 am Subject: Personal taste, needs and choice
Reading this article and the one before it, plus the comments (most of which are quite useful), I'm struck by one thing: a person's choice of browser is probably akin to her/his choice of car, based upon personal taste, needs, and choice. For example, some like OmniWeb's approach to tabbed browsing: I found that it just takes up way too much space--and I have a 20-inch iMac. I tried OmniWeb on my 12-inch PowerBook--ONCE. Others like the plug-ins/extensions for Firefox. I haven't found much use for them and I dislike the "Windows-look" of Firefox.
As a Panther user, I can't comment upon the latest Safari: mine is rather slow but usually reliable. I usually use Camino but go back to Safari to view embedded QuickTime videos correctly. I used to "need" the way Safari and iCab, unlike Firefox, etc., use the bookmarks as well as history for auto-completion in the address bar. However, I found that Camino and Firefox allow keywords for quick access to sites, which I have found to be more convenient in most cases. (Other browsers may do this, too.)
I like a simple, clean-looking browser that's fast and straight-forward to use. Right now, Camino fits that bill. Shiira is also very nice-looking, but lacks bookmark keywords or auto-completion from bookmarks as well as history.
I switched to OW and really like it. The most compelling feature for me is, by far, Workspaces. Allows me to visit all the sites I want to visit in a much more efficient manner. I have separate workspaces constructed for general news, sports, weather, business stuff, finances, etc... I don’t have to manually bring up 4 websites, I just load a workspace and it’s all right there automatically.
Great stuff.
Thu Mar 15, 2007 1:40 pm Subject: Re: don’t forget Workspaces
QuoteAnonymous wrote:
I switched to OW and really like it. The most compelling feature for me is, by far, Workspaces. Allows me to visit all the sites I want to visit in a much more efficient manner. I have separate workspaces constructed for general news, sports, weather, business stuff, finances, etc... I don’t have to manually bring up 4 websites, I just load a workspace and it’s all right there automatically.
Great stuff.
I do the same thing with Camino by putting a "folder" in my bookmarks bar and choosing, "Open in tabs." You can do the same thing in Firefox and Safari. No need to pay for that capability.
I prefer the Mac-ness of Safari, but I found my MacBook with 2GB feeling sluggish, and I did some reading and came across some info about a memory leak in Safari.
I decided to try Firefox full-time for awhile, and my system seems to be running more smoothly. Fewer pinwheels of death, and though I'm not crazy about FF's interface, stability comes before appearance for me.
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