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OmniWeb is a proprietary Internet web browser developed and marketed by The Omni Group. It is available exclusively for Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X operating system. Unlike many of its competitors in the Macintosh alternative browser market, Mozilla's Firefox and Camino, for instance, OmniWeb is not free; a license costs $14.95.
[edit] History
OmniWeb was originally developed by Omni Group and released by Lighthouse Design for the NEXTSTEP platform on March 17, 1995. As NeXTSTEP evolved into OPENSTEP and then Mac OS X, OmniWeb was updated to run on these platforms. OmniWeb also briefly ran on Microsoft Windows through the Yellow Box or the OpenStep frameworks. After Lighthouse Design was bought by Sun Microsystems, the Omni Group released the product themselves, from version 2.5 onwards. From version 4.0 onwards, OmniWeb has been developed solely for the Mac OS X platform.
OmniWeb is developed using the Cocoa API which allows it to take full advantage of Mac OS X features. It uses Quartz to produce images and smooth text, it will use multiple processors if available, and features an interface that makes use of Aqua UI features such as drawers, sheets and customizable toolbars.
OmniWeb originally employed its own proprietary HTML layout engine. However, the engine was not fully compatible with all of the most recent Internet standards, such as Cascading Style Sheets. In February 2003, the Omni Group adopted Apple's KHTML-based WebCore rendering engine,[1] which was created by Apple for its Safari browser.
On August 11, 2004, the Omni Group released version 5.0 of OmniWeb which included a number of new features. The most notable feature was an unusual implementation of tabbed browsing, in which the tabs were displayed vertically in a drawer on the side of the window (including optional thumbnail pictures of the pages.) Despite a certain amount of controversy over the merits of a tab drawer over tabs that actually look like tabs, the feature has persisted through the current version.
On September 6, 2006 version 5.5 was released. Major new features include the use of a custom version of WebKit instead of WebCore,[2] universal binary support, saving to web archive, support for user defined style sheets, a "Select Next Link" feature, FTP folder display, ad-blocking improvements, updated localizations, many other small changes and bug fixes.[3]
[edit] Features
- Separate window form editing: Click the square in the upper right corner of multi line form fields to open it in a separate window. This helps when you wish to add lots of text to an area which is very small and you want to see all of it at once. This feature also allows you to enter tab characters.
- Workspaces: groups of web browser windows and tabs in them. A user can have multiple workspaces for different web research topics and quickly switch between them with a key shortcut or menu choice.
- View Links: By clicking on this button in the toolbar, one can quickly view all the links contained in the page.
- Ad blocking: OmniWeb uses a powerful pattern match ad blocking feature to stop images from loading from servers matching the pattern. It is also possible to block images that don't originate from the current server you are browsing and to block images which match common advertisement sizes.
- Shortcuts: allows one to type a key word or phrase to open a certain web site or begin a specific web search.
- Site preferences: OmniWeb allows you to specify preferences that apply to specific websites. For example, if you adjust the font size on a given web page, the adjusted font size will be used on all other pages of the same site. Preferences are saved automatically and retained between browsing sessions.
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