OmniWeb 5 Preview

The OmniGroup, a longtime Mac OS X and NeXTStep/OpenStep developer, has posted a preview of OmniWeb 5, the next major revision of their OmniWeb browser.

OmniWeb was the primary web browser for NeXTStep and Mac OS X Server 1.x (a.k.a. Rhapsody). In early Mac OS X days, I preferred it over IE 5 as a browser for reading, because it used Quartz beautifully and rendered text much better than any other browser available for Mac OS X. However, it was unusable for other web purposes, as it used Omni Groups own HTML engine that was far behind other engines. But with release 4.5, OmniGroup replaced the HTML engine with Apple's WebCore framework, which is based on KDE's KHTML engine.

So what OmniWeb offers is a browser that renders web pages as good as Apple's Safari, but with more options and control and in a beautiful interface. I'm surprising myself by saying this, but OmniWeb 5 looks like a release I'd actually pay money for. Some of the new features include:

• Tabs - OmniWeb finally gets tabs, but in a form different from most browsers. Instead of a row of tabs across the top, OmniWeb 5 uses a side drawer with rendered previews of each tab's content with options to organize and move 'tabs' between windows. The downside to this feature is that it will probably be awkward in lower resolutions. Tabs can also be listed in text mode.
• Workspaces - Ability to save and restore whole browsing sessions, including window locations and tab contents.
• Site Preferences - Strong control of site by site preferences. This includes how OmniWeb presents itself in a user-agent field, page appearances/font sizing, ad blocking, and site by site security options.
• Bookmark Management - Safari has excellent bookmark management features, and OmniWeb looks like it extends on Safari's concepts nicely. Interestingly enough, RSS support looks like it's in OmniWeb's bookmark system. Also, favorite bookmarks can be shared on a LAN using Rendezvous. Unknown at this time is whether OmniWeb can make use of iSync, which can Apple's .Mac service to synchronize bookmarks between different machines (one of the best features ever).
• Page Marking - Safari introduced a cool feature known as "Snapback", which let you jump back to a certain page in a site with one click. OmniWeb looks like it offers the ability to mark multiple pages to jump back to, sortof like temporary bookmarks.

It's been reported that OmniWeb 5 will have a new status bar which will detect certain aspects of a page, including RSS feeds, and present icons with special actions for what it detects.

It's nice that Omni Group no longer has to worry about maintaining their own HTML and JavaScript engines, and can instead focus on the application. This gives Mac owners looking for a more advanced and controllable web browsing experience than Safari (intentionally kept simple) an excellent option, as the Mozilla based browsers for the Mac are either awkward (non native UI) or have fallen woefully behind in their maintenance.