Over the weekend, I was writing up a blog post, and when I got to about 75% done, I opened a new tab to get a link. OmniWeb crashed. Crap! OmniCrashCatcher pops up, and I filed what would perhaps be described as a more-colourful-than-necessary bug report. The next morning, however, I fired up OmniWeb again, and all of the tabs that I had opened were restored for me – and, get this – the contents of the WordPress blog post entry form were also resurrected for me, right at the point OmniWeb had crashed! I didn’t lose a thing! That’s just plain awesome. It never occurred to me to even check to see if the form values would be resurrected after a crash, so I assumed the post was gone. Of course, it wasn’t Shakespeare or anything, but still – that’s just cool.

On top of that, the “live” source editor rocks quite nicely, and the “Get Info” pane for any page is the best I’ve seen. (it would be even better if it allowed you to get the full URL for every resource, but that’s so minor)

So far, the OmniWeb experience has rocked. No plans to switch off of it as a default browser. But, there are a few little niggles that keep me launching Safari occasionally.

• The “AJAX” stuff in Flickr doesn’t seem to like OmniWeb. I’d thought maybe the ad-blocking stuff was borking it, so turned it off. No joy. Can’t add photos as favorites. Can’t edit titles/descriptions of photos. Can’t even open Organizer for some reason… Have to launch Safari for that – which is odd, since they’re both based on WebKit – perhaps OmniWeb’s embedded WebKit is a bit off?
• Some sites just don’t want to display in it. No idea if it’s a weird browser-sniffing thing going on or not, but I’ve had to launch Safari a couple of times to view things.
• CSS display seems to be a bit off – things like the Flickr photos section of my blog display weirdly – and there are other sites that don’t behave as they do in Safari.

But, those are relatively minor nits to pick. Hopefully easy fixes (either in configuration on my end, or in code at OmniGroup). I’m just glad I’m putting my OmniWeb license to use again

Update: Oh, yeah. Just realized that one of my machines has to run OmniWeb in “unlicensed mode” since the licensing system checks the LAN for other copies using the same serial number. That means I’d get to buy a license for every machine that I want to run OmniWeb on – not cool. I paid for the OW license, but I’d have to shell out another $29US for each machine I want to use it on. I could see a token fee – $5 or $10 per additional machine – but not a whole ‘nother license…

Update: I also find that I really miss Safari’s page-load-status-as-thermometer-in-Location-bar style of loading indicator. Makes it much easier to see status in my peripheral vision – in OW, I have to seek out the rotating “loading” widget, then click on it to see how much of the page is left to load. Much less elegant.

OmniWeb 5 has a lot of really nice features. The tab implementation is simply second to none. The app behaves as a first-class citizen on MacOSX. It’s got some handy stuff like a tearable textarea widget (so you can hit a button and the textarea box becomes its own window, with resize controls, and export/import functions). The source view rocks, too (with live editing as well), and it’s got a decent built-in adblocker.

And, it also offers bookmark syncing via WebDav! (note: U of C webdav info) I’m going to give it a shot as a default browser for awhile…

Here’s a screenshot of the textarea widget from the WordPress post entry screen, with the “torn off” windowed version as well:

So insanely simple, yet amazingly useful. I have similar shortcuts set up to hit the Wikipedia, and some of the mailing list archives that I use, oh yeah, and Flickr tags, too! Pretty handy stuff. Thanks Omni! (I’m sure this stuff could be trivially adapted for use in Firefox or somesuch, too…)

So, I grabbed my VGA adapter, plugged in the TiBook, and created a new workspace in OmniWeb 5. I added all of the URLs we were talking about as tabs (complete with handy thumbnail previews), and then we just cycled through the tabs. It was the slickest website review session I’ve seen. Just create a new OmniWeb Workspace for the client, set it to save automatically, and BOOM, you’ve got a handy dandy “live website presentation tool”. Very cool.

I could have done this with Safari, or Firefox, or some such, but the visual polish provided by the tab thumbnails was a huge benefit. Thanks, OmniGroup!

Things I love about OmniWeb 5

• The tab implementation freaking ROCKS. – almost exactly what I mocked up in January 2003, with the added bonus of page thumbnails… And the thumbnails are absolutely amazing and gorgeous. Can glance at 10 thumbnails and see exactly where I need to go next… And, it shows the status of pages loading in the background (shows a green checkmark on pages when they’ve finished loading)
• Saving the workspace as you work – so if you quit, or the browser crashes, all tabs are restored right where you left off the next time you launch (even remembering scroll position).
• Textarea form elements on web pages have this cool widget where you can get a larger sheet for more effective text entry – with an “Import from File” button. Awesome if you fill out a lot of forms (like, say while developing a web app…)
• Site Preferences – override application prefs on a per-site basis
• View: View in Source Editor! You can edit the HTML for a page in a source editor, and REDISPLAY THE EDITS LIVE, without having access to the page’s server. Awesome for debugging stuff.
• Ad blocking is awesome. And it’s highly customizable, too. Be gone, annoying flashing banner ads! Related to this is the ability to control animation of GIFs on a page – I’ve got mine set to allow animation for no more than 20 seconds.
• URL Shortcuts. You can add shortcuts for any URL, and as an added bonus, you can add parameters for pages that accept them (like search engines, etc…). Slashdot is just “slash” now. No waiting for autocomplete… I worked up a shortcut that allows me to search CAREO from the navigation bar (like Alan’s shiny new MLX Firefox plugin)
• Regular expressions in the Find utility. Holy crap! Not that I’m a RegEx expert or anything, but any app that cares enough to put that kind of functionality at my fingertips deserves some serious kudos.
• The “Page Info” panel. Every bit of detail of every single part of a page is available in a report. Files grouped by type (images, style sheets, scripts, frames, etc…) with full stats (file size, last modified date, expiry date of cache…). And, the ability to display each individual item, or save it separately, or view the source for it. Wow. Awesome for debugging websites…

Things I’m Ambivalent About

• RSS implementation. Thought I’d love it. Thought it would be the greatest thing since sliced bread. But it’s just nowhere near NetNewsWire, only showing titles of items in a feed, and not tracking read/unread state.
• Bookmarks. Maybe I just haven’t given it enough time, but it doesn’t seem dramatically better than Safari’s bookmark implementation (and has a wrinkle that you can’t drag a page’s URL proxy from the address bar into the in-browser-window bookmarks display – you get the bookmarks:/ URL instead. There’s a workaround, but that’s not the point…
• Shared Bookmarks – not really useful unless everyone on your LAN is using OmniWeb 5 – I’m the only one I’m aware of here…
• Multiple Workspaces – thought I’d really use these, but opening bookmark folders in tabs within the current default workspace works better for me.
• Bookmarks syncing – I’ve been a huge fan of this with Safari, so it’s not groundbreaking, but it’s great to know it’s there.

Things I’m Not a Great Fan Of

• Out of date WebCore. Doesn’t work with GMail (that’s the one thing I keep Safari running on a second machine for…)
• The “Save Window Size” command works great for single-display systems, but if I have a window on my secondary display while at work (on an external monitor plugged into my TiBook), and set the window to prefer that screen by “Saving Window Size” on it, then when I go home (without the external monitor), the window tries to open on the external monitor anyway. I can grab the edge of the title bar and drag it back on to the only screen, but it’s a huge pain. It would be cool if the app was smart enough to realize the number of screens, and relative position thereof while saving size…
• The Navigation Bar. Separate Stop and Reload buttons are redundant – and waste space on the nav bar. I can only do one or the other, never both… Also, I really miss Safari’s progress-bar-under-location-field display. It’s just so handy to be able to know that a page is about half loading by seeing a blue bar in my peripheral vision – without having to look up from what I’m reading, and without having to open an Activity Viewer. It’s nice to have the Activity Viewer, but it shouldn’t be the primary way to display page status.
• No way to export my bookmarks. It will import them fine. Great. Now what? It will read my Safari bookmarks (but not write to them). I’ve been using Safari Bookmark Exporter to export my Safari bookmarks to every browser on my system. Can’t do that anymore, since bookmarks will be going into my OmniWeb bookmarks file, which is in a different format…

Anyway, I’m sure it’s far from a complete list, in each of the 3 categories. Bottom line is, I love OmniWeb 5, and plan to be a long time user.

The extra features are great (edit HTML then refresh the browser window – on any website!). Love the thumbnail tab view. Love the speed and ad-blocking. Hate the lack of Safari’s cool progress bar. Hate the separate Reload and Stop buttons. Hate that GMail doesn’t work in it… I did pay my upgrade fee for OW5 already, though

I’ve been following OmniWeb’s development, and really like some of the new stuff (using WebKit means pages render correctly, the new tab implementation looks pretty sweet, workspaces should be useful, RSS feeds(?) …).

So, I’m going to try using OmniWeb 5 for a week, and see how it works in the field. I’ve switched my default browser to it so apps like NetNewsWire open it automatically. (btw, the tab thumbnails are awesome for opening stuff from NNW!). I’ll post again in a week with some thoughts…