The most notable feature was an unusual implementation of tabbed browsing, in which the tabs were displayed vertically in a drawer on the side of the window (including optional thumbnail pictures of the pages.) Despite a certain amount of controversy over the merits of a tab drawer over a tab toolbar, the feature has persisted through the current version. On August 11, 2004, the Omni Group released version 5.0 of OmniWeb which included a number of new features. In OmniWeb version 4.5, the Omni Group adopted Apple's KHTML-based WebCore rendering engine, which was created by Apple for its Safari browser. > However, this engine was very slow, particularly when scrolling, and was not fully compatible with all of the most recent web standards, such as Cascading Style Sheets. OmniWeb originally employed its own proprietary HTML layout engine that used standard API NSText components. It uses Quartz to produce images and smooth text, it will use multiple processors if available, and features an interface that makes use of Aqua UI features such as drawers, sheets and customizable toolbars. OmniWeb is developed using the Cocoa API which allows it to take full advantage of Mac OS X features. From version 4.0 onwards, OmniWeb has been developed solely for the Mac OS X platform. After Lighthouse Design was bought by Sun Microsystems, the Omni Group released the product themselves, from version 2.5 onwards. OmniWeb also was able to run on Microsoft Windows through the Yellow Box or the OpenStep frameworks. As NextStep evolved into OpenStep and then Mac OS X, OmniWeb was updated to run on these platforms. In my quest for an up-to-date browser to use in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on my two old Pismo PowerBooks, one that I had consistently passed over was OmniWeb, which was the very first OS X web browser out of the blocks a decade ago.OmniWeb was originally developed by Omni Group for the NextStep platform, and was released by Lighthouse Design on 17 March 1995 after only one month's development time. ![]() OmniWeb was originally developed for the NextStep platform in 1995, then migrating to OpenStep, and finally to Mac OS X. OmniWeb was also the last major commercial software browser holdout (except for iCab, currently at version 4.8a, which remains nagware), finally dropping its licensing fee in February 2009. That fee had been one reason for my looking elsewhere, but it wasn’t my biggest objection to OmniWeb I dislike thumbnail bookmarks tabs. ![]() You can switch to a text-only tab list, but it still lives in a vertical slide-out drawer, which can be positioned at either the left or right of the browser window, still eating up the same amount of precious screen real estate for us small-display laptop users, which is my main complaint about the thumbnails – not the pictures. Low End Mac viewed in OmniWeb on a 1024 x 768 display.Įven with the tab drawer reduced to about its minimum useful size, I still can’t get all of Low End Mac’s home page to show on my Pismo’s 1024 x 768 display I have to scrolling sideways. I also find it particularly tedious and counter-intuitive having to navigate there to close tab windows. However, OmniWeb is one of the rapidly diminishing selection of actively developed browsers that still supports Tiger. #OMNIWEB BROWSERS MAC MAC OS X#Īs a Tiger holdout, I appreciate any developer still taking an active interest in supporting the last Mac OS X version that (officially) supports G3 and slower (than 800 MHz) G4 Macs, for which I give the Omni Group developers appreciative credit, so I thought OmniWeb deserved a fresh new evaluation I’ve been using OmniWeb for the past couple of months or so, and I’m happy to report how pleasantly surprised I’ve been at how nice-working OmniWeb is on both the Pismo (550 MHz G4, 1 GB RAM, OS X 10.4.11) and on my Late 2008 Unibody MacBook (Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, 4 GB RAM, OS X 10.6.6). The thumbnail tabs are still an annoyance, but I can tolerate that, especially for speed and stability on Tiger, which OmniWeb 5 has. None of the browsers I’m using with Tiger is really satisfactory, and I’ve long suspected that browser compatibility will probably be what ultimately ends the Pismo’s run as a production workhorse. Opera 10.6.3 is pretty good – fast and quite stable – but it has a compatibility bug with PowerPC that causes it to bog down badly with long paroxysms of spinning beach ball when entering text in fields, such as when doing Google or Bing (a surprisingly good search engine) searches. Opera 11 doesn’t support PowerPC 10.6.3 is the end of the road for Tiger (and OS X 10.5 Leopard) on PPC Macs. ![]() SeaMonkey and Camino both still officially support OS X 10.4, but they seem to get slower and slower on the old 550 MHz G4 Pismos with each incremental version upgrade.
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