2 min read

OmniWeb - A Much Better Safari

⚠️ 📜 This is archival content from many years or even decades ago. Links may not work. Images may be broken and my opinions may very likely have changed. Please do not judge the content here too harshly.

| | | jduprey | December 1st, 2004

I've read many good things about the [OmniWeb](http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/) web browser, but [Safari](http://www.apple.com/safari/) and [Firefox](http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) are great and **free**. Lately Safari's been having these "pauses" in which the little spinning beach ball shows up and I can do NOTHING with it for several seconds. Firefox is great, but it doesn't quite integrate with the Mac as tightly as I'd like. So I finally tried OmniWeb on a whim and I'm finding that I really like it.

OmniWeb 5.0 is a commercial application and uses the same open source rendering engine as Safari via Apple’s WebCore. (The rendering engine, KHTML, comes from konqueror - a KDE-based file/web browser.)

So far, there are two main features that I really like:

  • Thumbnails instead of tabs. See the picture to the left.
  • Workspaces. OmniWeb remembers all your opened web pages and you can even create different workspaces for different sets of web pages. I know you can simulate this in FireFox, but with OmniWeb its seamless.

There are plenty of other features, but these two make it almost worth the $30 (US).

Other notable features include an RSS reader which I would consider using, but it doesn’t display the full HTML summary. I’ll stick with NetNewsWire for now.

Read this Daring Fireball article on the beta version of OmniWeb 5. It is now considered stable at 5.0.1.

fraserspeirs has also praised OmniWeb.

*[December 1st, 2004]: 2004-12-01T01:34:00+03:00