OmniWeb: Ehh…Maybe
In our ever-continuing quest to find the perfect browser, we decided recently to give the new version of OmniWeb a spin. For those of you on Windows machines, you can skip most of this: the browser is for OS X only.
For those of you on OS X, using Firefox, Safari, Opera, Camino, or some other alternative, you might find the following highlights useful:
- The Good
- Quick loading times: OmniWeb seems to load pages quite quickly. We’re not into the whole “sit in front of the machine with a stopwatch thing,” but we noticed that OmniWeb consistently loaded pages more quickly than both Safari and Camino, was a tad faster than Firefox, and was about the same as Opera.
- The tab layout scheme (with the thumbnails of the tabs on the left) is awesome. We considered this to be another overhyped feature…until we used it. Having a visual glance at your tab options is incredibly handy, and this feature alone might be reason enough to use OmniWeb.
- Bookmark layout: it’s on the same relative plane as Firefox and Safari, with a very intuitive page for editing and creating bookmarks. We found ourselves missing the integrated del.icio.us links available natively through Flock, and via extensions in Firefox, but satisfied with our local options. The ability to sync bookmarks across iSync (and .Mac) was also quite useful.
- Rendering: everything looked as it should on 95% of the pages we visited.
- The Bad
- The username/password management is absolutely terrible. Terrible. Some of the combinations that it came up with for logins was not only dead wrong, but quite creative. We saw the mixture of usernames and email addresses on several different pages - some of which wouldn’t correct themselves even after telling OmniWeb to accept the new values. Sadly, this issue is substantial enough to keep us from using OmniWeb as our main browser.
- The price: you’re going to have to break out the wallet if you want to use OmniWeb. It’s $29.95 for a single license, and $44.95 for a family license. While that price level isn’t particularly unreasonable, the free alternatives (every other browser we’ve talked about) make the price seem a little difficult to swallow.
- Display lag: we noticed that on slower machines (read: eMac G4/800 with 800MB RAM), form entry lagged several key strokes behind our typing. Yeah, we type fast…but that’s no excuse. Occasionally closing and re-opening OmniWeb helped a tad - which might suggest memory leakage - but who wants to do that? If you’re using Firefox, you’re probably already doing this…but you didn’t pay for Firefox, did you?
On the whole, OmniWeb is a solid browser. The username/password problem is a big one to get around in our book; but if you’re not big on saving that kind of info in your browser, you’ll probably find the graphical tabs to be worth the $30.
Technorati Tags: browser, omniweb
October 23rd, 2006 at 6:40 am
Happy click and comment Monday.