Veerle's blog

Safari 1.2 isn’t the only browser out today, the Omni Group has released the first public beta of OmniWeb 5.0. This browser was shown at MacWorld In January and can now be tested by Mac users. I haven’t tested it long enough for a serious review but I can definitely say that this browser has serious potential to be one of the best software releases of 2004. I viewed my blog in it and it has the same bug as safari a while ago. The part that fits on the screen is ok but as soon as you scroll the background is gone.

It’s no surprise after all because it uses WebCore v85, which corresponds to Safari 1.0 that shipped last June. The two most promising features in my opinion are tabs and workspaces. The tabs are with thumbnails and you can drag & drop any link into the tab drawer. So you can drag a link from a page into the tab drawer and it will load as a thumbnail. Workspaces are ideal for reading a lot of websites.

Let’s imagine that you have all the useful CSS sites out there open in your tab drawer and you haven’t viewed them all but need to reboot your Mac. If this was in Safari or Explorer you need to bookmark them all and load them back again when the machine is rebooted. With this version of Omniweb you create a workspace, OmniWeb saves information like which web pages you have open in your tabs, your history, and even the location of the windows on your screen.

You can drag and drop the contents of one workspace to another to further organize them. Take a snapshot of a workspace and instantly restore the workspace from the snapshot, clearing away any changes you made to the workspace in the meantime. Workspace files can also be emailed to other OmniWeb 5 users allowing you to easily share many websites with others using a single file. Cool isn’t it? There’s a lot more where that came from, so check it out!