OmniWeb

Commercial; $29.95

Current Version: 5.7 (April 10, 2008)

OmniWeb was the first Web browser for Mac OS X / Mac OS X Server. It's fully-featured, with a gorgeous interface. Recent versions of OmniWeb (4.5 and later) employ Safari's HTML rendering engine for improved rendering performance and functionality.

Version 5.7 adds/changes the following:

• OmniWeb is now based on the WebKit stability branch roughly equivalent to the version used by Safari 3.0. (Updating to the version of WebKit in use by Safari 3.1 is in the works.)
• On first launch your favicon database location will be set to our custom default. Favicons may initially disappear, but should now persist between launches/restarts once repopulated.
• Use Leopard's new code signing technology to sign OmniWeb, so you can be prompted just once to give OmniWeb access to your keychain (rather than being prompted each time you download a new version).
• Images blocked by ad-blocking and then loaded, will no longer show the blocked image badge.
• Refetching in the source view will once again refetch the page's source content from the server, rather than just reverting to the content from the corresponding browser window.
• Pages with framesets should now draw properly.
• Some blocked content (such as Flash plugins) were getting their "blocked image" placeholder drawn in the lower left-hand corner of the window.
• Ad blocking should no longer prevent Javascript redirects.
• License files will no longer be created with the "execute" permission enabled. (The files were never actually executable.)
• We now display these release notes on launch if they've changed since they were last viewed.
• Most toolbar icons have been updated for Leopard.
• JavaScript will no longer show the toolbar if it's normally hidden.
• When downloads are in progress, OmniWeb will now prompt to ask whether you want to quit or continue downloading.
• The Load All Images button in the status bar should now display for blocked content on the current page. When pressed it should load blocked content and disappear
• Added "Mail Contents of This Page" to the File menu. (Also renamed the neighboring "Send Link" menu item to "Mail Link to This Page".)
• Added checkbox in the Display preference panel to decide whether to display PDF's inline, or download.
• When Software Update finds an update with the same major version as the currently licensed application (e.g. OmniWeb 5.x), it should now correctly indicate that the update price is free.
• The license window will no longer continue to display "No license available" after a license is added.
• Updated Chinese, French, Italian and Japanese localizations.
• Fixed an issue where drop-down menus in the preferences were changing their widths inappropriately, making localized versions hard to read.
• General localization tidying.
• When Pressing the Back button while viewing a PDF should actually take you back now.
• While viewing PDFs, the download button available on the HUD display will now download the PDF to your default location.
• PDFs should now always get the proper context menu.
• Fixed a crash triggered by attempting to undo after closing a tab or loading another page in the current tab. (Each tab now has its own independent undo stack, and the undo stack is cleared each time a tab loads a page.)
• Fixed a crash sometimes seen when closing tabs (which could also happened when restoring a workspace from a snapshot or quitting).
• Reduce OmniWeb's memory footprint and CPU usage by only rendering tab thumbnails when they're needed rather than rendering a thumbnail every time a page updates whether or not it's currently being displayed anywhere.
• Worked around a bug on PowerPC's running 10.5 which sometimes caused a hang when manually checking for updates.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when using Load All Images.

Despite rave reviews in other places, all I can say is: even given all the new features, I find OmniWeb slightly underwhelming. Site-by-site preferences - which may be OmniWeb 5's most useful feature - really demonstrate that serious problems with the Web itself are the larger issue . . . in short, if one site behaves so profoundly differently from other sites that my browser settings need changing, there's no good reason for me to visit that site. Since most of OmniWeb 5's other new features exist in (or are capable of being closely or completely emulated with) other browsers, it is hard to recommend OmniWeb despite the fact that it's an otherwise unobjectionable - and attractive-looking - piece of software.

That aside, if there is one single feature that makes OmniWeb worth its $29.95 price tag, it has to be its genuine (yet still a bit buggy) ability to check web sites for updates, on both a scheduled and manually-instantiated basis. Other software claims to do this, but OmniWeb just does a better job of it, and the bugs in the current implementation - while they are not show stoppers - are actively being addressed.