I absolutely love this browser. Maybe I'm biased since I first used it back in '94 on a NeXT. OmniWeb has a lot of little touches that make it great. To me, one of the nicest features is that it is a pretty browser and it's easy to read. I tend to get tired/strained eyes at the end of the work day, but with OmniWeb it's much less of an issue.

I have been using OmniWeb for a solid week now, and love it. It renders so fast, much faster than any other browser I have used for the Mac.

I do have a lot of crashes though. In fact, I could not even get the app. to launch on Saturday. Once I re-installed it, everything was fine.

It seems to be a frames related problem, but www.themacgroove.co.uk and www.sofasoundstudio.com are 2 examples of sites that Omniweb can't open. I have come across so many others, I wish they'd fix it. OW has had this problem for agaes.

Been using it for about 5 months now. I have problems with a few sites working properly and in those instances am forced into Safari or Firefox but for the most part this is my browser of choice.

"The one thing Safari has that I wish was available in OmniWeb is snap back."

It is. History > Mark Page. (You can put its icon on the toolbar too.

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Guest wrote:
It seems to be a frames related problem, but www.themacgroove.co.uk and www.sofasoundstudio.com are 2 examples of sites that Omniweb can't open. I have come across so many others, I wish they'd fix it. OW has had this problem for agaes.

Other readers, do not be conned into clicking those links. This is just spam. OmniWeb renders them fine, this person posts this BS for every single update of OmniWeb at macupdate.com and versiontracker.com - it is just SPAM.

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Anonymous wrote:
"The one thing Safari has that I wish was available in OmniWeb is snap back."

It is. History > Mark Page. (You can put its icon on the toolbar too.

There it is... just like you said. I've been using various versions of OmniWeb for a few years now, and never noticed Mark Page feature. I'll start playing with it and update my review once I'm comfortable talking about the feature.

OmniWeb has so many layers of customization that I keep finding new surprises all the time.

Jeff

I was a diehard Safari user but I decided to give OW a try last November and I haven't looked back since. It's like they took the best third party plugins from Safari and integrated into OW and it's integrated well which I really like. The adblock catches almost everything. I wasn't too hot on the sidebar tabs at first but it works really well if you want to open multiple links. You can drag and drop them into the sidebar. Pretty cool. It's a fast feature packed browser that's well worth the money.

I absolutely love OmniWeb, except for one thing:

It has horrible memory problems, or at least it did last time I used it. Actually, I should try it again; I think I last tried it on my 2004 PowerBook which only had 512 MB of RAM; I'm now the proud owner of a maxed-out MacBook Pro with 3 GB. But still, though it would probably run more smoothly, it doesn't solve the core problem; looking at Activity Monitor, its memory would absolutely balloon as I used it; after I've had it open for a day or so, it's using hundreds of megabytes (swap and physical), even if I close all the windows. Naturally, it's unusably slow by then. I hope they work on this for future versions.

I crossed over to Omni in my family this past fall when my wife and children started complaining about how Safari was just non-responsive on many of their web pages (forums were their biggest problem), so I downloaded Firefox, Camino, and a couple others, but it seemed like all would work for a while, and then begin to slow down (yes, I _do_ have an ancient Pismo, but our kids are using a very recent Mini). Only Omniweb kept moving crisply, and loaded all their "demanding" forums with aplomb. So, I took advantage of the family licence, and we've been happy since. However, after upgrading, I've learned so much more about Omniweb that just blows away all the competition! It's site-specific settings are wonderfully customizable, including its ad-blocking features.

However, one area where the above review really falls short, IMO, in describing Omniweb is in its "tab" interface. Those little thumbnails can also be displayed as a text list display--which is great if you have a ton of tabs open--you can fit them all on one screen. But the real power comes when you want to break one of those multituninous tabs out. Just double-click it, and it is now in its own window, where you can populate it with its own batch of tabs! Want it back? Simply grab its thumbnail, or even its icon in the title bar, and drag it back to the original window's tab drawer! Have a link in your email? Drag it to the drawer, and put it where you want, and a new tab opens right where you want it! All this works with Expose, as well. I find that I use this feature constantly, creating views that work for me, rather than being forced to deal with things as they come. I now get frustrated when I move to other browsers. Can't imagine life without Omniweb now. It's only "weakness" is that when you close a tab, it doesn't take you to the previously-viewed tab, but the one below the removed one. Very minor issue.

Oh, and it seems to crash on my 8mb Video-ram too frequently. I know when it's going to "crash" because it only happens when certain apps (photo apps, mainly) open. Oh, and even though the Crash Catcher comes up, I can continue using Omniweb for hours _after_ it supposedly crashed! How's _that_ for stability!

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Guest wrote:
I was a diehard Safari user but I decided to give OW a try last November and I haven't looked back since. It's like they took the best third party plugins from Safari and integrated into OW and it's integrated well which I really like. The adblock catches almost everything. I wasn't too hot on the sidebar tabs at first but it works really well if you want to open multiple links. You can drag and drop them into the sidebar. Pretty cool. It's a fast feature packed browser that's well worth the money.

Funny is, those third parties (and large vendors) generally got the features from Omniweb and they don't credit it.

For example, I heard entire "popup block" thing is an Omniweb invention but unfortunately I wasn't on Mac that time. Perhaps someone knowing the story may post it.

I was happily adding "auto sensed" RSS feeds before Tiger Safari came out via "Newspaper+" icon at right bottom, yes on OS X 10.3.x.

A tip: Check the right top of the form you type in this comment, click it and see what happens It took me a year to spot it *g*

BTW this is one of apps that I bought after 2 hours of trial. The reason was simple, I asked for a VERY TRIVIAL thing to be fixed as DEMO user, from Istanbul. In 10 minutes a developer replied to me saying it will be fixed (again: trivial!) in next release.

...the 14.95 OmniWeb costs now when I bought my license several years ago...
and I don't regret it one bit. OW drips value!

Well don't get me wrong i like omniweb, gave it a try, but somehow i hate the drawertab, personal preference really (ihope they give an option to use regular), then i'll use it, and also i do a lot of bookmarking and i want to be able to bookmark some site and able to view it in different place. with firefox i could use it though delicious.