News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

March 15, 2007

software

Safari Experiment redux

Posted Mar. 15, ’07, 10:20 AM PT by Kate Marshall
Category | Software

genericSafari.jpgRemember when I told you about Jeff Gamet’s plan to try Safari-alternatives?Well, he’s moved on from Firefox to OmniWeb for this week’s experiment (and is even adding Camino to the list of subjects). As you may know, OmniWeb is different from other Mac browsers in that it costs real money (as opposed to that fake Monopoly money I like to draw when I’m bored). For your $14.95 USD ($4.95 if upgrading from a previous version), you get ad blocking, saved web sessions, “workspaces” (saved collections of related windows), and an innovative tab organizing that groups tabs off to the side of your screen, and lets you rearrange them easily.

So how did Gamet’s fling with OmniWeb turn out? Well, largely favorable:

Keyboard shortcuts were easy to use, and didn’t require me to click first and then invoke a shortcut. I’m all about saving time and being efficient when I’m at my Mac, and I really felt like OmniWeb helped me out instead of getting in my way.
I had no qualms with Web page rendering times, and OmniWeb was stable all week long. OmniWeb also had that “made for a Mac” fluid feel that Firefox was lacking. Actually, I’ll go so far as to say OmniWeb felt more Mac-like to me than Safari.

I remember playing with OmniWeb back in 2003, when I was but a carefree sophomore at a small liberal-arts university outside Philly. Although I had no serious complaints with it, my “poor college student” mentality won out and in the end, I decided to stick with my current-at-the-time iBook set-up: a horrible combination of Internet Explorer for Mac, and AOL’s own ugly, bloated browser (I had AOL dial-up access from 1998 to 2006. Now let’s never speak of it again).


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