- #OMNIWEB FOR MAC REVIEW FOR MAC OS#
- #OMNIWEB FOR MAC REVIEW MAC OS X#
- #OMNIWEB FOR MAC REVIEW MAC OS#
- #OMNIWEB FOR MAC REVIEW UPDATE#
Chrome was muscling in, and most Mac users just stuck with what their computer came with, Safari.
In 2009, OmniGroup decided that it couldn’t continue devoting resources to OmniWeb, which started as a paid app and then transitioned to free. That gave OmniWeb a new lease on life, keeping it more or less relevant through the aughts and into the early 2010s. Thankfully, with OmniWeb 4.5, OmniGroup decided to switch to WebCore, which Safari was based on. I had grown used to them over the years, and I found it impossible to change. It was also missing workspaces, toolbar search customization, synced bookmarks and content filtering ( with regex!), among others. Then Microsoft dropped IE for Mac, and Apple decided to get into the game, releasing Safari in January 2003.īased on the open source KHTML rendering engine, Safari was fast and flexible, but it was sorely lacking the power features I had come to expect.
#OMNIWEB FOR MAC REVIEW MAC OS#
For Mac addicts like myself, that was another strong selling point.įor a few years after the public release of Mac OS X, OmniWeb and Internet Explorer were pretty much the only two options for web browsing. Oh, and it wasn’t made by Microsoft but an indie shop with a long history of cranking out solid NeXTSTEP and Mac OS software. Images were bright and the text was crisp and smooth. Interface elements were in the lickable Aqua theme, and images and text were rendered using Quartz, the new OS’ compositor. It was written in Cocoa, the then-new programming language that represented a clean break from classic Mac OS.
#OMNIWEB FOR MAC REVIEW MAC OS X#
The app was about as pure a Mac OS X experience as you could get. Shortly after OS X developer previews became available, OmniWeb’s developer, OmniGroup, ported the browser. The app had been originally made for NeXTSTEP, OS X’s precursor, with a beta available in 1995. Before Internet Explorer was bundled with Mac OS X Developer Preview 4, intrepid testers could use OmniWeb for their browsing needs.
#OMNIWEB FOR MAC REVIEW FOR MAC OS#
OmniWeb was arguably the first web browser available for Mac OS X. (The screenshot shows how expanded and collapsed tabs appear in OmniWeb 6, which did away with the deprecated drawer UI element in favor of a sidebar.) Plus, a vertical list is much easier to navigate when the number of tabs starts numbering in the dozens, something that happens to me all the time. Computer screens have been wider than tall for a while now, and putting tabs on the side of the window makes better use of that space, allowing users to view more of a webpage’s content. For the web-obsessed in the early 2000s, it was a power user’s dream.įor that crowd, vertical tabs are really the best way to go. You could refresh the whole stack in just two clicks and see which pages had updated just by glancing at the thumbnails. When tabs got too numerous, you could collapse them into smaller, text-only buttons. They updated in the background and could be reordered by dragging them around. Twenty years ago, OmniWeb had a sidebar (a “drawer” in Interface Builder-speak) that faithfully rendered thumbnails of open web pages. But the browser that introduced me to the concept - and really ruined other browsers for me given the elegance of its implementation - was OmniWeb. Microsoft’s Edge offers it out of the box, and Chrome and Firefox both have extensions that enable the feature, and Safari did at one time, too. Sidebar tabs aren’t a new idea, of course. But there’s one new user-facing feature that’s been on my wishlist for nearly a decade - sidebar tabs.
#OMNIWEB FOR MAC REVIEW UPDATE#
The browser update is mostly focused on things users can’t see, like security and performance. Today, Apple released Safari 16, a major point release that’s debuting ahead of Ventura.
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