Related link: http://www.omnigroup.com/
OmniWeb 5.0 has finally shipped. I’ve been beta testing it for a while now, and I use it more often than Safari. I love site preferences, saved workspaces, RSS support, and their novel implementation of tabbed browsing. I do wish that OmniWeb’s auto-fill was more like Safari’s, but that is really its only weakness in my eyes. Version 5.1 which will integrate the latest release of WebCore and is expected soon.
What browser do you use?
Yep, OW5 is good stuff
I too have been beta testing OW5 and really like it. Not only does it have some features that are really nice to have like site preferences and workspaces, but it's the fastest browser on my PowerBook (G4 1.5GHz). Yep, faster than Safari and faster than Firefox. Surprised the heck out of me because on my previous PowerBook (G4 667MHz), the same version of OW was the slowest browser and Firefox was the fastest.
I'm sure a lot of people won't find $30 worth of usefulness out of it, but for web developers and other browser power-users, it is money well spent.
plusses and minuses
On my 800mhz TiBook, OmniWeb is great -- perhaps a tad slower than Safari, but that's more than compensated for by the terrific features. Workspaces have already changed the way I work, much for the better, and (unlike many beta testers) I love Omni's implementation of tabs. But on my old 500mhz iMac at home, the screen just isn't big enough to use the tabs without shrinking the main window to a less-than-usable size -- plus the app is numbingly slow on that machine. But for anyone who has a newer machine, and is a serious working user of the web, OmniWeb has to be the browser of choice.
One thing I'd like to see Omni work on is a better implementation of the newsreading function. It is SO much easier to organize sites and navigate through their summaries on NetNewsWire. (In fact, ease of navigation -- using arrow keys and tab -- also sets NetNewsWire apart from Pulp Fiction and NewsMac.) It may be that in a broswer -- that is, an app by definition not dedicated to newsreading -- there's not much more that Omni can do, but in any case, for the near future I'll be sticking with NetNewsWire.
Re: RSS
I agree with you on the RSS front. But, I love the idea of RSS being integrated into the browser so much that I only use OmniWeb for that. I typically just tell OmniWeb to load them all into tabs and then I just close the tabs with Command+w if I'm not interested in the content.
I think I'll like the RSS implementation in Safari better, but I can't be sure since I haven't used it. I'm just basing it off of screenshots and video I've seen. It'd really take some time using it and OmniWeb for me to determine which really works best for me.