Omniweb 5 wishlist / journal / hicksdesign

12/08/04

Omniweb 5 wishlist

Now that Omniweb 5 is finally released after many months of beta releases, we now have a sturdy, feature filled Webcore based alternative to Safari. For anyone that uses a lot of tabs, OW is godsend, but I’m left with just a few niggles that I would love to see changed in the next version:

Preference for ‘Always show tab drawer’. When you have tabs set to open on the left, its annoying when new windows shift when the tab drawer opens.

RSS feeds to open in new tabs, not windows.

Improve the look of the download manager. Safari gets this right. Its particularly bad when OW is downloading. The text is badly compressed. Just ugly.

Use the latest webcore (this is planned for 5.1)

Remove the ‘image well’ shadow from the bookmarks toolbar, or introduce a Tiger style Mail.app look. I’ve actually created a shapeshifter theme just to remove this shadow. I know, you don’t have to tell me I have no life.

Ability to save the current set up as workspace, rather than having to create a new space and set it all up first.

I also think the documentation could be a little less waffley and childish. Humour is a difficult one to pull off – and with the PDF manual I felt myself saying “For goodness sake, just get on with it!!!”.

Apologies for yet another browser related post.

Technorati Tags Tags: browsers, omniweb, osx, software, wishlists

Comments | RSS

Comments are now closed, but you can still have a jolly time reading what others have left:

Jason Santa Maria said 1520 days ago:

Agreed.

They should also spring for someone to design a decent theme for this thing.

Jon Hicks said 1520 days ago:

Hmmm. A bit more like this ?

mathew h. said 1520 days ago:

jon, i would consider putting this list of items into a real list. for a minute there, i thought “just ulgy” was its own line. ;)

no chance to play with it yet . will download tonight and let you know!

-m

Jon Hicks said 1520 days ago:

Matthew – cheek of it! It is real list! :o)

Jason Santa Maria said 1520 days ago:

That is a million times better, Jon.

mathew h. said 1520 days ago:

i’m very sorry if my last comment made me sound like a jerk (especially since it’s like my first post here!). love the site. just didn’t know what was ugly. :)

-m

Jon Hicks said 1520 days ago:

Don’t worry, I took in the spirit it was said! Nice homepage illustration BTW

Phill R Kenoyer said 1520 days ago:

I’m definitely not buying it until they get most of the bugs fixed. I got bit last time with version 4.5. The beta versions worked great, then the last two versions broke everything and they released them. What a mistake.

I bought two copies of it for my wife and I. The thing was totally full of bugs. It was useless on eBay. I was expecting them to fix it, but then they just abandoned it to work on version 5.

Now I have to buy version 5 witch is a bug fix for version 4.5. What a rip off.

So before I plunk down the money for it. I’m going to fully test it and make sure they are going to support it.

It’s totally worth the money, if the bugs are fixed.

mathew h. said 1520 days ago:

jh: hey thanks. i think the bluebird’s going to become a logo or something. i think. :)

i might be crazy (or overlooking something), but i can’t help but wonder how many people pay for web browsers. thoughts?

#10

Loren K. Olson Jr. said 1520 days ago:

Plenty of people pay for Web Browsers. You think Safari is free?????? Think again and answer your question. And Safari is not the best either, it still has a long ways to go.

#11

Matt Chaput said 1520 days ago:

“A little less childish?” You have a gift for understatement. If the page you linked to is any indication, they need to get whatever developer or web designer is writing that stuff back on their real job and hire a technical writer. Or someone who’s actually, y’know, funny.

It’s painful enough when I’m just trying to read about features, I can’t imagine having to go through it when I’m trying to get the answer to a problem from the manual.

#12

mathew h. said 1520 days ago:

i guess i mean when you can get firefox, mozilla, etc. for free, why pay for browsers? safari cost me, but the cost was bundled into my new comp so i didn’t notice it at all.

#13

Richard B said 1520 days ago:

First off, I am impressed at the work that the OmniWeb crew put into not rushing OW 5 out the door like some other browser projects that are falling apart at the seams because of it.

I would like to see URL auto-complete, at least as an option. I would also like to see an option for a bookmark sidebar (I know that I can open the bookmarks in a separate window) and have the bookmarks in the sidebar be associated with the particular tab that is active. In other words if you have a tab that is for news sites and keep the bookmarks for news where you can see them you could then go to another tab for software updates and have the bookmarks for them convenient and when you went back to the news tab the news bookmarks would be where you left them.

I would also like the URL of whatever web site you are on to remain in the URL window when you click on bookmarks so that you can simply drag and drop the URL to the bookmark folder that you desire. Adding bookmarks is somewhat more complicated than it needs to be when adding a bookmark several layers down in things (yes, I keep a lot of bookmarks). I have three rows of folders of bookmarks in the Favorites bar and would like the option to conceal the overflow from the first row with a ”>>” rather than always have the screen space be taken up by the extra rows. Maybe even a ‘grippy’ to collapse the Favorites bar entirely would be good.

I am also impressed with the attitude of the OW crew as they are always looking for ways to make OW better/more flexible rather than considering it to be “done” the way Apple treats Safari for the longest periods of time.

Good work OmniWeb!

#14

Richard B said 1520 days ago:

P.S.

It would be great to have a “save as” feature that saves an entire web page in a single file and saves the URL so that you can connect to the internet to see if anything has changed…the way that IE does. This feature would put an end to IE being my “default” browser. I actually browse in other things, but keep IE there to save pages.

#15

Danny said 1520 days ago:

I like it a lot. It’s strait forward and easy to use! Is it just me though or is it a bit slow. I’m thinking its only an illusion because of the way it loads graphics but it seams slow to me. Anyone else having that problem?

#16

Paul D said 1520 days ago:

Feature-wise, Omniweb is the nicest browser I’ve ever used. I like, among other things, the thumbnail tabs and how the ad blocker can block based on ad dimensions.

If it wasn’t for the bugs I’ve experienced using the latest beta, I’d pay for it without hesitation. But the few times I used it, it wasn’t very snappy (on my 1.25 GHz G4) and had runaway processes or something, because it kept getting slower and requiring restarts. It’s tiresome clicking the tab for a loaded site and then having to wait for the page to appear.

#17

Josh H said 1520 days ago:

First, no apology needed Jon, I actually look forward to your latest thoughts/experiments/minutiae (I clearly have no life either).

Personally I just can’t get comfortable with Omniweb on my 12” iBook. I just don’t have enough screen real estate. If I used a bigger monitor more often (one day, maybe, but I’m just too mobile these days) then I could see that those tabs would be great.

Even then I’d probably be waiting for the latest WebCore – I’m happy to have left v85 behind some time ago!

My current top 3: Saf(t)ari; Firefox (with new widgets)!; Hicks themed Camino(tabs)!

Keep it going, you keep improving my browsing experiences, thanks.

#18

Tom B said 1520 days ago:

A couple comments:

“Ability to save the current set up as workspace”

There’s nothing sacred about your Default workspace. You could rename it if you wish (and make sure “Auto-save while browsing” is checked) and just make a new workspace to become your new scratch space/default/pig pen.

“hire a technical writer”

He starts Monday. Took us four months to find him, so you’d better be nice to him! Now I have to go get Grayson and Linda some Ben and Jerry’s and see if I can staunch the flow of tears.

-Tom

#19

Jon Hicks said 1520 days ago:

Why pay for a browser? Why pay for any software? Maybe because its good? Omniweb is a fantastic browser. You can get Safari near by adding extensions like Saft and Stand, but it still doesn’t quite make it.

John Gruber compared it to iMovie and Final Cut Express. Both are excellent applications, but OW offers that much more for people who browse a lot.

I’d also say, don’t judge the final release by the standard of the betas. Its much more stable. Even if it does crash, I can reopen OW and all my tabs are recovered.

Tom -very sorry if I offended you/your writers. I can see what you’re trying to do, and I like the Omni Groups more ‘friendly’ style, but I did find the jokeyness a bit tiring.

#20

Allan Nielsen said 1520 days ago:

I would like to have dated download folders.

I’m not sure how OW handles downloads since I gave up on the tool after just using it for a minute or two. But having the download rate in kb/s shown aswell as the number of kilobytes retrieved out of the total.

A good example is not a browser but Proteus’s filetransfer window. It shows the time left and kilobytes retrieved. It switches by an interval which is cool.

And ofcourse I would love to see new graphics for the toolbarbuttons.

#21

Jinketsu said 1520 days ago:

When are you releasing the OW theme?

“Always show tabs” is definitely needed. As well as keeping the widow as you last had it before quitting.

#22

Jon Hicks said 1520 days ago:

Jinketsu – OW does save your window before quitting. All you have to do is check the ‘Auto save while browsing’ option in the workspaces window. This option is per workspace though.

#23

Phil said 1519 days ago:

I’m well happy with the final release of OW5, though sometimes it does appear a little sluggish. I was also surprised that the LiveSearch XMLHttpRequest thing on my site didn’t work. In all though, it offers some great features and is worth the 30 dollars.

I’ve stopped using Safari almost entirely now (it’s poor caching ability drove me nuts), so it’s a straight fight between Camino and OW in the Dock!

#24

Ayjay said 1519 days ago:

I love OmniWeb—on a computer with enough (horizontal) screen real estate to use the tabs without squeezing the main window. Workspaces are amazing—I don’t know whether I can live without them now that I’ve tried them. But the RSS implementation leaves a lot to be desired—both navigating and organizing are much harder than they should be. And I totally agree about the need for an “always show tab drawer” option—it’s highly annoying to have to click on “Tabs” every time I open it. I would also like to be able to have my bookmarks as my start page (because OmniWeb’s way of organizing bookmarks is brilliant)—but not have every new blank tab or window I open after that also be the Bookmarks page. Perhaps when I get better at dealing with the Workspaces options I’ll solve that problem, though. . . .

#25

Patrick Nielsen Hayden said 1518 days ago:

I’m loving OmniWeb 5, but there’s a small but non-trivial thing it doesn’t seem to do.

A lot of bloggers-~~here’s one~~-maintain a sidebar of links to interesting recent web stuff, and they use the “title” tag to create one-line comments that pop up when you mouse over those links.

This works in all the other browsers I use—Safari, Firefox, IE, etc. It seems to simply not be there in Omniweb.

Am I missing a preference setting, or is this a case where everybody else is breaking the web standard and Omniweb is following it?

#26

Sam Walker said 1518 days ago:

I wish there was an option to show the Bookmarks bar without favicons. I’ve found they’re largely useless for quickly identifying a link, and I like the much cleaner look it has without them (like in Safari).

#27

Jon Hicks said 1518 days ago:

Patrick – Its just because they’re using the webcore from Safari 1. Tooltips weren’t introduced into Safari until 1.2. The next release of Omniweb (5.1) will include this.

Sam -I know what you mean. It would be nice if the bookmarks toolbar followed Safari’s style generally, Rounded corners on the down state and decent sized type.

#28

Kevin said 1516 days ago:

I find the main toolbar icons in OW 5 kind of “heavy”. The previous icon set was more subtle. I wonder if they were getting complaints about users not being able to see the icons well enough.

I also think OW contains a few examples of “how not to design icons”. For instance the View Links and Summarize icons are basically colorless rectangles containing tiny smudgy details that require a magnifying glass to read.

#29

Tom B said 1515 days ago:

“For instance the View Links and Summarize icons are basically colorless rectangles containing tiny smudgy details that require a magnifying glass to read.”

You can read those? We don’t want to assume that the user’s language is English or even that it’s a left-to-right language. The idea is to give an abstract suggestion of the results. “Something that looks like text”/”Something that looks like bookmarks”.

I’m sure there’s room for improvement, but putting readable text in those icons wouldn’t be it.

About favicons and the favorites bar… well, we didn’t want to be another Safari and rip off their look entirely for the favorites bar. We wound up feeling that we’d stuck the favicon in too many places, but couldn’t decide where to remove it. In the favorites bar, it helps me find a favorite more rapidly than the title does. In the address field and title bar, it makes an excellent drag handle and “brands” the page. In the Site Preferences icon, it conceptually binds the feature to the site your mucking with.

I am still mulling over our options for improving things like that, as I’m sure are others, so your feedback is appreciated. Maybe one day you will see dogtag style boookmarks in the favorites bar. I don’t know. ;-)

#30

Jon Hicks said 1515 days ago:

Tom,

I know what its like. If you go too much like Safari, you’ll get flamed for copying. However, in the upcoming changes to the Firefox theme, the toolbar bookmarks go even more dogtag style, with a nice aqua highlight on the push. You could argue that this has become an expected behaviour.

I just feel that Omniweb’s interface is let down by the bookmarks toolbar and download manager. I’m not so worried about the toolbar icons, as these can be easily personalised.Its especially annoying when the other 90% of Omniweb has got the OS X details so right.

Where safari scores is that the interface is clean, streamlined and unobtrusive. I’d rather use Omniweb, but the interface leads me away sometimes.

#31

David said 1512 days ago:

Hi, I wonder where we might be able to get our hands on that theme you designed for OmniWeb 5 (and demonstrated for us way back in comment #2). Your theme is so nice, and the default theme is so… not nice… it sort of makes one drool, you know?

#32

Jon Hicks said 1512 days ago:

I sure will! I’m waiting for the Omnigroup to publicly release their icon theme plugin. The theme has been developed to work with this, and makes it much so easier to apply the theme. Hopefully it’ll be soon, but I’ll announce it on the main blog when I do