OmniWeb 5.1 Beta Sports Updated WebCore

The Omni Group has released OmniWeb 5.1 Beta 1. The updated Web browser includes many improvements, with one of the most notable being an updated version of WebCore, the KHTML-derived rendering engine developed for Safari. There are also improvements to Java, Forms and Printing among others. From the release notes:

Layout and Rendering

  • Integrated the latest WebCore rendering engine with enhanced standards compliance, performance, and stability.
  • Due to the updated WebCore, many pages which did not render or behave correctly in OmniWeb 5.0, but which worked in Safari 1.2.x, will now work in OmniWeb 5.1. For example, www.gmail.com is now supported.
  • We now support the small-caps font style.
  • TITLE attribute tooltip support.
  • Changing page appearance attributes (like Page Colors, Override Page Styles, etc) no longer requires a reload of the page -- they affect the page instantly, just like when you change the font style.

Forms

  • You can now tab between form elements (text fields, text areas, buttons, popups, checkboxes, radio buttons, etc) if "Full Keyboard Access" is enabled in the "Keyboard" preferences in System Preferences.
  • We now have a General preference for the behavior of the TAB key.
    • It can cycle through only form elements or both form elements and links. The option key reverses the behavior.
  • Option-tab no longer inserts a tab character into textarea elements. Control-tab can now be used to insert a tab character into both text fields and textarea elements.
  • Fixed the ugly focus ring problem seen on web page form elements such as fields and textareas.

[The full release notes are quite extensive, and can be found at the OmniWeb beta Website. - Editor]

OmniWeb 5.1 Beta 1 is compatible with Mac OS X 10.2 or better. It can be downloaded at the OmniWeb beta Website.