The Hickensian

26.04.06 A quick guide to Omniweb 5.5 sp6

30 comments
Tagged with: browsers, omniweb, osx

Omniweb 5.5 is finally a public beta! It felt like it would never see the light of day, but here it is. To get it, you need to register on the new Omnigroup Forums, and then view this thread for download information.

Notable changes in this version are:

Omnigroup have converted Omniweb to use WebKit, rather than Webcore rendering. In fact 5.5 is using a more up to date version of WebKit than Safari is – its the one that enables unstyled form buttons. (See this post by Dave Hyatt for more information). All Omniweb’s previous problems with sites like Flickr are past!
With the change of rendering, Omniweb is much, much faster. I’d say as fast as Safari is on my powerbook. I never thought I’d describe Omniweb as ‘snappy’, but thats how it is!
While the system-wide dictionary look-up doesn’t appear in the context menus, the keyboard shortcut – Apple Ctrl D – works just fine.
You can now specify CSS rules per site, as part of the extensive site preferences feature. On a site you want to change, select the CSS file to use, and the view is immediately updated! Per site CSS is nothing new to Mozilla browsers, but this has a nice easy GUI, as well as instant gratification!
There are still a few Omniweb features that need re-implementing, most importantly the wonderful zoomed text editor. For anyone not familiar with this, it provides a separate window for writing and editing text in textareas. I hope that gets back in soon.
Pop up windows are now opened as new tabs.
Finally – unified toolbars! Hallelujah!

The focus on this release was very much on the huge code change from Webcore to Webkit, so its nice to see new features like per site CSS sneak in.

Last, but not least, the spanky new Web Inspector (DOM Inspector to you and I) works too. To enable this is a similar process to Safari. Open Terminal and type:

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5 WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

Next time you launch Omniweb, the ‘Inspect Element’ command is found in the context menu. I love the iLIfe/Aperture style HUD inspector, and use this a lot to look at styles affecting elements in the DOM.

Finally, if you want to hide the stripey ‘Under Construction’ banner in the toolbar, type this into Terminal (as of the new sp7 release):

defaults write com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5 HideConstructionWarning -bool true

While I’m still hoping for updates and improvements to Omniweb’s interface, this release makes it feel great again. This just causes me more browser indecision!

A wee note for anyone using my Omniweb theme. Don’t – not on 5.5 anyway. It adds some images that Omniweb no longer needs, and seems to muck things up a bit. I’ll try and get a revised theme out soon.

Comments | RSS

No.1

∞ Steve Lianoglou said 1385 days ago:

Thanks for the heads up .. I’ve been waiting for this one :-)

A quick tip .. I was looking through the Prefs section and noticed there is an option (in the Tabs and Windows pane) to pick ‘left’ or ‘right’ ... I think I saw this one on the screencast for Kinkless GTD, but if you option-click on the tab-drawer button, it’ll open up the drawer on the opposite side than the one it is currently on.

Thought that might come in handy.
-steve

No.2

∞ testmonkey said 1385 days ago:

great, another browser I can feel guilty about not using. Will the guilt never end?

No.3

∞ ADM said 1385 days ago:

After registering on the forums and activating my account, I get the message that I don’t have access to that forum topic. Anyone else have this problem?

No.4

∞ Adam said 1385 days ago:

I was able to download the file, but the dmg password in the linked thread isn’t working for me. I can’t mount the doggone dmg!

No.5

∞ Andrew Hamann said 1385 days ago:

This is music to my ears…

No.6

∞ Oliver said 1384 days ago:

Good to see, but I really wish they would implement regular tabs already. My 12” screen simply isn’t big enough for a browser window with a drawer.

No.7

∞ oliver said 1384 days ago:

Maybe I’m doing something wrong butâ€¦

you do not have permission to access this page.

No.8

∞ g said 1384 days ago:

same problem hereâ€¦ not so public after all, that public beta. too bad.

No.9

∞ Jon Hicks said 1384 days ago:

Those having problems, have you registered first like I told you to?

No.10

∞ Markus Peter said 1384 days ago:

It seems that one needs access to the Sneaky Peek forum, too, which you do not get automatically be registering on the board :-(

Anyway, as long as they won’t include the “send RSS to other application” feature, I probably will not come back to OmniWeb, even if the rest of the changes sounds great.

No.11

∞ Markus Peter said 1384 days ago:

Hmm, strange. I found a link to the Sneaky Peek forum somewhere and now, strangely, I can access the thread. Maybe you have to access that specific forum first before you can read the thread.

No.12

∞ Bob said 1384 days ago:

Hm, I registered normally. But I have other question – where can I see changes list?

No.13

∞ Steve Marshall said 1384 days ago:

Woo! Woooo!
WOOOOOOO!

ahem

This is really cool: I’ve missed using OmniWeb (the primary reason being because of instabilities), and now I can return to my most favouritest browser.

Yay :)

No.14

∞ Chris McElligott said 1384 days ago:

Sneaky Peak 7 is out now, not sure whats fixed. They need to update their change log.

No.15

∞ josh said 1384 days ago:

Omniweb 5.5 is certainly much faster now! Feels good.

The terminal command for the inspector worked fine for me but the command to hide the ‘construction tape’ across the top didn’t work for me.

No.16

∞ Paul D said 1384 days ago:

Holy cow! I never thought I’d say this about Omniweb, but it feels â€¦ snappy! Quicker than Safari, even. Hopefully that won’t change as I subject it to my demanding surfing habits.

No.17

∞ josh said 1384 days ago:

I updated my copy to sp7 from Chris’ link and the construction tape is gone now. Not sure if it’s because of the terminal command I used earlier or if it’s related to this version but that unified bar looks amazing!

If they could improve that favorites bar and the whole icon set I’d be a whole lot happier with it. And like you mentioned Jon, I can’t wait until they get that zoomed text editor back in too! It’s coming along nicely.

No.18

∞ Jon Hicks said 1384 days ago:

Josh – the tape is still there in sp7, but the preference only works in sp7. Sorry – should’ve stipulated that

No.19

∞ Brutal said 1384 days ago:

I have to say I’m really impressed with OW5.5. They’ve fixed everything I disliked with the previous versions. (Mainly certificate-trouble and lousy speed)

I might just make it my default browser!

Btw: How do I delete bookmarks from the Imported bookmarks-folder? And how do the search shortcuts work?

No.20

∞ Laender said 1384 days ago:

That sounds really good :)

No.21

∞ Steven W. Riggins said 1384 days ago:

Somehow command-control-d is broken on my laptops, or OS X is borked. It does not work on my powerbook nor mac book pro in any OS X app.

No.22

∞ Russ Wittmann said 1383 days ago:

its asking me for a password…boohoo

No.23

∞ Jon Hicks said 1383 days ago:

Did you read the forum post Russ?

No.24

∞ Anthony Baker said 1382 days ago:

Hmm… have missed this sucker. Safari has grown on me in a big way, but there’s a lot to love about OW 5.5. They still have the best bookmarks manager out there (love the notes), it’s fast as all hell (seems even speedier than Safari), and there are other perks.

Won’t switch to it as a default, however, until David Watanabe ports Inquisitor to it. Also, I have to say that I now dig the side tabs capable in SafariStand better than Omniweb’s.

Finally: Where’s the Hicks navbar theme? (These default icons have to go…)

Thanks for all the pointers to the beta, Jon.

No.25

∞ Jon Hicks said 1382 days ago:

Anthony – I asked David about porting inquisitor to Omniweb, and sadly, its not on his radar. As Omniweb’s market share is so small, I think the development time isn’t worth it for him.

Also – I must say I prefer Omniweb’s tabs over Safaristands. I prefer the larger size, and you can do so much more with them – alt drag to duplicate them, cmd or shift select several, double click them to open them in a new window, grab a bunch and open them in a new window…blah..blah…blah.. :D

No.26

∞ Eddie Sowden said 1382 days ago:

Another day and Mr Hicks seems to be in bed with a different browser, good on yaâ€™.

No.27

∞ Jon Hicks said 1381 days ago:

Just Testing whether this still works after I’ve been fiddling!!

No.28

∞ Ramin said 1380 days ago:

I get scared of by the fact you have to pay for Omniweb. I’m so cheap.

In all seriousness though when you look at their competition in Firefox and Safari, two free browsers, then they’re always going to lose out.

No.29

∞ Jon Hicks said 1380 days ago:

Cheapskate! :D

Once Safari and Firefox have all the features of Omniweb AND the advantages of OSX native ness (Firefox I’m looking at you here) then they can be considered ‘competition’.