With the question of the rendering engine finally settled, Omni was free to focus on the other long-rumored aspect of OmniWeb 5: its "new, innovative" user interface. (Like the "G5" chip before it, the actual product to ship with the "OmniWeb 5" moniker is not what was originally expected. Perhaps for the same reasons that Apple chose KHTML over Gecko, Omni chose to use Apple's KHTML-based WebCore technologies as the basis for OmniWeb 5's rendering engine. It was time to face the music on the rendering engine issue and adopt a competitor's technology instead of creating something from scratch. The Omni Group had one final play to make. All the drawers and customizable toolbars in the world won't help when your rendering engine is rusty and your competition is bundled or free. Things looked bleak for OmniWeb with its $30 price tag, inferior support for web standards, and slow rendering speed. Many people waiting for a slick UI coupled with a modern rendering engine decided that they'd found just that in Safari.
OMNIWEB BROWSER MAC OS X
Then came Safari, bundled with Mac OS X and with the complete backing of the mothership. Time passed, and OmniWeb 5 didn't materialize. Imagine all the user interface goodness of OmniWeb, but with a brand-new rendering engine under the hood. Advertisementįor the faithful, the prospect of OmniWeb 5 was tantalizing. The number 5 began to take on some magical significance, perhaps helped along by the years-long anticipation of the "G5".whatever that was. Whispers began to circulate about OmniWeb version 5 which was to have an all-new rendering engine. The layout engine in OmniWeb 4 was crippled by design choices that made sense nearly a decade earlier, but were now making progress difficult or impossible. OmniWeb had a loyal base of users, but rendering speed and standards support became serious issues after the Gecko invasion.
A wave of Gecko-based browsers soon arrived on Mac OS X. As the platform matured, the web browser competition heated up. The fact that this impressive application was created by such a small team of programmers at Omni is a testament to the powerful application development tools and libraries supported by OS X.īut this was during Mac OS X's infancy, when it took a lot less to make a big splash in the then-small pool of native Mac OS X applications.
OMNIWEB BROWSER FOR MAC OS X
OmniWeb is a veritable poster child for Mac OS X technologies and interface elements such as drawers, configurable toolbars, system-wide services for typography, spell checking, and so on. As I wrote almost three years ago in my Mac OS X 10.0 review: Version 4 was an impressive Mac OS X application. Previously unknown applications suddenly became award-winning examples for other Mac OS X developers to follow. The Omni Group moved wholesale to the Mac OS X platform after Apple purchased NeXT in 1996, porting and then substantially improving all of its products. Like The Omni Group itself, OmniWeb started its life on the NeXT platform, home of the world's first web browser.
OmniWeb has a long and sporadically distinguished history. Enter The Omni Group and their near-mythical web browser, OmniWeb 5.
OMNIWEB BROWSER SOFTWARE
This is rare, especially in an established application category like web browsers.Īs a lifetime Mac user and all-around technological sentimentalist, I tend to look to the underdog for software innovation. Like most web developers, I look upon every new addition to the web browser ecosystem with simultaneous hope and suspicion.Īs a user with a well documented obsession with usability and interface design, I am always looking for software that takes its interface one step beyond what has come before it. After a decade or so of web development experience, the web browser is both my ally and my enemy. As faithful readers can attest, I am not among them. Some people have trouble getting excited about web browsers.
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