Safari’s tabs are displayed in a wide but short strip, across the top of the browser window. The argument against OmniWeb’s tab implementation is that it uses up a lot more screen space than does Safari’s (and Mozilla-based browsers). I’m listing it first in this review, however, because I anticipate it being the most controversial feature - it’s the most visually distinct new feature, and when the peanut gallery gripes about “the interface”, they tend to focus on what an app looks like. I like tabbed-browsing in general, and I like the Omni Group’s implementation, but it’s not even close to being the best or most important new feature in OmniWeb 5. Tabs can also be shown in a list view, sans thumbnails, to fit more tabs in the drawer without needing to scroll. The thumbnails are scaled representations of the page displayed in the tab. In fact, visually, they’re not really tabs at all, but rather thumbnails in a drawer on the side of the window. The idea of which is much the same as it is in Safari and Mozilla-based browsers, but the visual presentation is quite different.
#Omniweb download download
Keep in mind, if you download the public beta, that it is very much beta software, replete with crashers and other show-stopping bugs. Here’s an overview of the big new features. OmniWeb 5 is the first release where Omni has been able to focus almost solely on the browser application, rather than the rendering engine. OmniWeb 4.5 was a stop-gap, the first release of the browser that used WebCore instead of the Omni Group’s home-grown (and terribly outdated) rendering engine. OmniWeb 5 is important because it offers an abundance of major new features, including two that are revolutionary. With a rendering engine based on WebCore and JavaScriptCore - the same underlying technologies Safari is built around - OmniWeb 5 renders pages beautifully, and, more importantly, offers robust support for web standards.īut the current version of OmniWeb - version 4.5 - also uses WebCore, and it’s an also-ran browser. Based on today’s beta, and the two alpha releases I’ve used for the last week, OmniWeb 5 has the potential to be a very big deal. Today the Omni Group released the first public beta of OmniWeb 5.0. OmniWeb 5 Public Beta Monday, 2 February 2004
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