Re: Omniweb++
- From: john@xxxxxxxxxxxx (John Robinson)
- Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 14:12:54 +0100
zoara <me3@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> John Robinson <john@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > zoaran substitute <nettid1@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[Discussion of the wonder of OW5's tab and session management features
snipped]
> Yeah, you see, that's the thing. Despite the adversity of slowdowns and
> crashes (a lot less frequent than they used to be, though), I couldn't
> live with stuff that fell short in the way you describe. I could live
> with it, I'd just rather make the sacrifice elsewhere (ie Omniweb
> crashes, oh well, restart it). The tab thing works very well (eg I can't
> live without cmd-up and cmd-down) and I suspect little touches like that
> might well be missing from extension-implemented functionality....
I think that if it was just that OW5 crashed I could have lived with it.
It's the fact that it stopped saving workspaces and bookmarks reliably
prior to the crash that killed it for me. I'd restart OW5 after a crash
only to find it opening up the workspace from the last orderly shutdown.
It was bad enough that I found myself trying to remember the contents of
the other couple of dozen tabs I'd had open at the time of the crash,
but I was horrified the first time I realised that it had also failed to
save changes to my bookmarks or changes to the browsing history. Perhaps
if crashes had occurred months apart I could have lived with this
behaviour, but right now OW5 won't go a day without crashing and I just
don't need the hassle.
> It's not just tabs though. Every so often I'll find a new feature which
> proves useful; every so often I'll be forced to use another browser and
> suddenly realise that what I've taken for granted all this time just
> doesn't really happen on Other Browsers.
>
> But because I take it for granted, I can't really list anything. Saved
> state is one I really can't live without, and the tab management as
> mentioned. What else? The history/bookmark search is good, working on
> metadata as it does. Workspace management is a boon. Per-site viewing
> preferences (font size, download-to, ad-blocking, autofill, styles
> over-ride etc) is a can't-do-without.
I agree that per-site preferences are a really, really nice feature of
OW5. I know they're listed in the roadmap for Firefox, but IIRC they're
some way down the line yet, something for the Firefox 2.* series.
Happily some of the Firefox extensions I use for ad blocking do allow
site-specific settings, so I can match some of the effects that used to
be achievable in OW5. But there's no denying it, OW5's feature set makes
it far and away the nicest browser I've ever used. It's as far ahead of
the competition as Opera was when it trounced IE and Netscape under
Windows a few years ago by introducing tabbed browsing.
> > But then, when I used OW5 I usually turned the thumbnails off anyway;
> > multiple pages from the same site would often be indistinguishable when
> > displayed as thumbnails,
>
> I don't normally have multiple pages from the same site open in any one
> window, unless I'm flicking through el reg or engadget. Most stuff I do
> gets several tabs from different sites (organised by 'subject') and,
> although I hadn't realised this until now, I *do* navigate by thumbnail.
> I really do remember what the various pages I have opened on the subject
> of extreme knitting look like, and can pick the one that I remember
> seemed the most promising from my bunch of thumbnails.
Picture-based sites like Flickr or deviantART were the ones I found
easiest to navigate by thumbnail. Trouble is, most of the sites I visit
are text-heavy and one thumbnail of a long article from the Guardian
tends to look very much like another.
[...]
> > If a future release of OW5 got back the stability of earlier versions,
> > had a bulletproof session saving feature and (ideally) was a bit nippier
> > when I had a few dozen tabs open I'd be happy to give it another try.
>
> I've found current versions to be more stable than older versions. I
> gave up on OW for a whilke around the 4.x mark.
As someone who only Switched a little more than two years ago, I never
tried OW4. Having been introduced to tabbed browsing by Opera under
Windows, I soon settled on Safari (which got official support for tabbed
browsing shortly after I Switched), then started using OW5 until it
became so unreliable that I was open to being seduced by Firefox.
Every time a new OW5 beta comes out I install it and give it a day or
two to prove to me that it's worth my time, so I may yet be reunited
with OW5.
[...]
.
- References:
- Omniweb++
- From: Graham Lee
- Re: Omniweb++
- From: zoaran substitute
- Re: Omniweb++
- From: John Robinson
- Re: Omniweb++
- From: zoara
- Omniweb++
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