Interview with Ken Case, CEO At Omni Group 57
Gentu writes "Omni Group, makers of OmniWeb, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and other OSX products, talked to OSNews via its CEO, Ken Case. The interview talks about the company and its products, Apple's strategies, Safari, NeXT and the future. Case believes that Safari does not pose a threat to the OmniWeb market-share."
uber elite hackers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:uber elite hackers (Score:5, Informative)
The oldest was called Nexus, also simply known as WorldWideWeb.app [w3.org] by Tim Berners-Lee. But OmniWeb is probably the oldest that survived.
Re:Quake *2* in a week? (Score:3, Informative)
You are right however about Quake 3. And OmniGroup did get it basically up and running within a week or two. They can code OS X apps pretty much as well as any Apple employed developer I would imagine. They deserve a lot of credit for setting the example for good OS X apps.
Re:uber elite hackers (Score:3, Interesting)
OmniWeb and Mail.app were two of the reasons I moved to a Mac in 2001 from using my NeXT full-time. I proudly bought OW a second time. Now, though, I have to admit, that I'm using Safari full time. It's the only browser I've seen that produces results that are as attractively presented as OmniWeb. When I was forced to use IE or a gecko-based browser instead of OW (usually for JavaScript reasons), I would blanch. They're almost unusably ugly after you become accustomed to the elegance and attractiveness of OW.
Re:uber elite hackers (Score:1)
OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:1, Insightful)
No tabbed browsing, very poor standards support (CSS, JavaScript).
One thing about it absolutely rocks though: cookie handling.
In OmniWeb you can specify if cookies are rejected, kept until end of session, kept indefinitely, or if omniweb should pop up a dialog asking what to do on each cookie.
You set one of these as the default, and you can set any one of these options on individual domeains.
Very simple. This allows me to set cookie handling normally on slashdot.org, paypal.com, etc., for auto-login; reject cookies from online ad sites; and accept cookies until end of session on all other sites.
This gives me nice fine-grained control over cookies. How come no other browser does this? With most browsers it's all or none.
Add in an option to reject cookies from sites other than the one in the location bar (to stop ads and third-party images from tracking me), and you'd have the perfect cookie control.
I hope this kind of cookie control shows up in Safari.
Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:5, Informative)
Omniweb loses out on IE and CSS support, I agree - but MY online banking still prefers it to any other browser, and Safari's timeouts really do BORE me now.
Re:and?! (Score:2, Troll)
Evidently not. Why would I? My opinions have not changed.
All you ever say is that tabbed browsing is bad, and everyone is simply ignorant who thinks otherwise.
Actually, a few weeks back I posted several extremely lengthy and thorough critiques of tabbed browsing, none of which received an intelligent response. I don't know if you people aren't reading them, or what.
Either shut-up or do a scientific study on the usability of tabbed browsing and report it!!!
Well, I won't claim it was scientific, but I most certainly did report my analyses. I guess nobody on Slashdot is interested in facts. They're more interested in checking that "post anonymously" button and accusing each other of being trolls.
Which is fine. I just don't like to play that game myself, that's all.
Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:2, Informative)
If you need tabbed browsing, you're using the wrong window manager. Mac OSX may not be as good as OS9, but it's a damn site better than anything else (Living products, that is).
I didn't even bother going into Omniweb's other great features like it's excellent page junk filtration, voice control (try it! it actually makes sense), excellent source editor (lovely tag highlighting - where's that in Safari?). Face it - Omniweb is a true 'power' browser - albeit one that's undermined by it's laggardly standards support. It's certainly a better long term productivity aid than anything else I've used.
iCab cookie management (Score:2, Informative)
iCab rocks (Score:1)
Re:iCab rocks (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:3, Insightful)
Tabbed browsing is a horrible idea anyway. It harkens to the Windows UI idea of having document windows within the program window. Each window is supposed to be a single document. Each page open in a separate window is a much better UI paradigm.
The one thing I missed when I switched from iCab to OmniWeb was the fine-grained control over picture loading, although I believe they took that out of iCab in the more recent versions. You could block based on image pixel size, if the image server or path matched a wildcard expression (e.g. block all images that come from ads.* servers, or that have /ads/ in their path), or whether or not the image came from the same server as the page did.
Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:2)
Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because Windows started the MDI thing long ago does not make tabbed browsing awful. The fact is that Windows simply had a really horrible implemetation of MDI. Windows inside of windows - eeew. Tabs are intutive, easy to use, and most implementations are well though out. They improve performance, and help to organize content that otherwise can get out of control. I used to hate having tons of browser windows open, and having to cascade them just so, so that I could go back and forth between the slew of pages I need to have open at work - now I use Chimera and am much happier.
I realize that folks have various issues with them, some contrived, some genuine, but they do solve a usability problem I have suffered under for years better than any other solution I have seen yet. If you do not like them, great for you, you need not use them. For me, I can't live without them, and I will never use a browser that does not support tabs unless something better comes along that solves the same problem as elegantly.
Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:1)
So when you have 20 (or more) webpages open, as I frequently do, you would like to have 20 different windows? This is one of the worst UI nightmares I can imagine. I don't really care about which "paradigm" is better, I care what works better. Not everything has to be in its own window. Why do you think so many people LOVE tabbed browsing? Just because you don't like it doesn't make it 'a horrible idea' any more than having 30 open windows is a horrible idea (though that fact is nearly indisuptible).
Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:3, Insightful)
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
6)
7)
[and so on, all the way to]
20)
Ironically enough, where tabbed browsing would be most useful is where it becomes least practical to use.
Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:1)
well, slashdot has a little green "/.", sourceforge has an orange sphere, and apple is the one without an icon. at least here in mozilla-land.
funny how the discussion of an interview can be morphed into another holy war (that's what tabbed browsing seems to be these days, imho)
Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:1)
[ slashdot ][ apple ][ more tabs]
There isn't any reason this (or multi-row tabs?) couldn't be implemented in other browsers. I *love* tabbed browsing, personally
Internationalization (Score:2)
Re:OmniWeb .. cookies. .. (Score:1)
Omniweb sucks in eaxctly 4 aspects: Javascript, DHTML, CSS and rendering speed (especially with tables!)
EVERYTHING else simply rocks! It rocks so much i'm still using it as my primary browser in spite of all the flaws mentioned!
Omniweb was the first browser i've seen in a loooong time that brought a *very* large number of really useful features that often make you think "why didn't anyone think of this earlier?"
Here's a short list:
1) Filtering of Linebreaks, Tabs and Spaces in the URL bar. Have an URL from an email or Webpage that spans several lines? No problem! Copy it, paste it into a new OW-Windows and press return! You might even opt for the even easier feature of services and just highlight it and press "shift-apple-u"!
2) FULL Drag & Drop support. Yes, not even Apples own Safari can do the full thing! Try dragging an image onto Photoshop! ONLY OW can do that it seems! Most browsers don't even allow dragging of text into from-fields, which really pisses me off!
3) Shortcuts. Once you got the hang of this, you wouldn't wanna miss it for anything! I've defined shortcuts for TheReg, Google, Google image, a german/english translator, versiontracker and i could prolly fix one for
Open new Window, enter "i eagle" and boom i get eagles from google image search!
4) Contextual menues. Only OW (and now Chimera!) offer me *all* the options! If i have a linked image, i can choose to copy the image itself into the buffer, the image URL *or* the link on the image! I need all 3 often enough, so hooray for OW!
5) Banner-filter. Yes, some other browsers have this, too, but OW just has it all
6) Nice extra tools like a traffic monitor that shows you the process of the page being loaded in detail or an Error log that shows errors the webserver sends! Also very nice: the Page-info-window that shows you all the info on the linked file and even gives you thumbnails for every image
7) a great source editor with highlighting and marking of open tags
8) Great options that let you basically adjust every small behaviour!
It's funny to see how all these features filter down onto other browsers like Chimera bit by bit! I'd say that means OW owns all the others! >:-)
Hearing that Omni might base OW5 on Apples Webcore makes me jump in joy since that means all the letdowns mentioned above will be fixed and the good stuff is retained.
I could never use Safari, it just doesn't offer what i need, and speed is only one thing among many for me that makes a browser interesting for me, as is compatibility!
market share (Score:2, Interesting)
perhaps that's because they'd have to have some market share to lose some?
seriously, i tried omniweb on recommendation. however, i found it seriously lacking. while it must have strengths (or it wouldn't garner a recommendation from anyone), it doesn't have tabs, nor does it render css. with those two shortfalls, especially the latter, it's pretty much unusable in my eyes.
Re:market share (Score:3, Informative)
Yes it does. Your CSS rules just have to end with a semicolon, like this: The semicolon is optional, so says W3C, but the OW CSS parser is just malformed in that respect. OW is a very nice browser, but it's renderer and standards support need a lot of work, as Ken Case admits several times in the article. Hopefully they will use WebKit in OW5 and get all of that work done for free by Apple and concentrate on making a great interface.
Re:market share (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't actually think you have to use the word "hopefully" here. Just a day or two after Safari and WebCore were released, Case announced that OmniGroup would be using the WebCore foundation for the next major release of OmniWeb. Whether he's talking about WebKit or some kind of home-grown wrapper around WebCore is unclear, but the gist of it is that OmniGroup won't have to screw around with HTML rendering or JavaScript execution any more.
Case made the point really well in the very first interview question. He said that Safari is for people who use the default browser that comes with the OS, and that Apple is rightly trying to make that default browser as great as they can. OmniWeb, though, is aimed at people who aren't happy with the default browser. Two totally different points of focus.
Re:market share (Score:2)
Sorry, Omni Group, but that's how it is.
Re:market share (Score:1)
If that comes to pass then OmniWeb will have the speed and better CSS compatibility of Safari. Only Safari lacks many of the cool features of OmniWeb. OmniWeb really only lacks a tabbed browsing or similar interface feature but that omission is no different from Safari.
You would be insane not to go back. In my opinion the Omni interface is better than Safari's but that is subjective. You can't argue with the wealth of useful features in OmniWeb however.
The new thing in 4.2 beta 1 is to open text area boxes into a separate edit window (so you can better see your slashdot postings
Stick with Safari for the speed and the CSS compatibility since that is what is important to you, but keep an eye on where OmniWeb is from time to time. You might end up switching back.
Re:market share (Score:2)
Of course I'll keep an eye on Omniweb (I downloaded the latest version when it came out this week), but I can't see it getting as good as Safari for me.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:market share (Score:2)
...because both users already told Case that they don't plan on switching.
:-) Sorry, I couldn't resist. Actually, I do use Omniweb and I like it very much.
OmniWeb feature: Live editing of HTML (Score:2, Interesting)
Tabbed Browsing (Score:1)
I really like the tabbed browsing feature found in Netscape 7/Chimera Navigator/Mozilla. Do you have any plans to add this feature to OmniWeb?
We feel the functionality that tabbed browsing provides is very useful and we do plan to add something similar to OmniWeb with version 5.0. Entry last updated on June 24, 2002
source: OmniWeb Support + Help Page [omnigroup.com]
Cookies, Toolbar, and it was just so damn pretty!! (Score:5, Interesting)
As everyone else pointed out so well was cookie control.
The toolbar, over looked by most, was a another huge factor for me wanted be able to have every pixel i can get for a web page. I loved how the link was in the toolbar too. Also on the toolbar, why was apple the first one to put the reload and stop button in one? I'm I the only person in the world that thinks that was just genius?!?! anywho...
Back in the days of 3 browsers (ie, mozilla, omniweb) Omniweb won me over based on loading fast and looking so damn good but now the heat is on with Chimera, Phoenix (why? i don't know), Safari but I think if Onmiweb can take what made it and other browsers great I would gladly jump right back, and keep chimera on the side, we all know why ;)
Opera did that first... (Score:1)
It's a good idea in some respects, but it also takes me a little while to get used to - I like it when buttons are discrete.
Combination Stop/Reload button not a good idea (Score:1)
This turns out to be a bad idea from a usability standpoint, because the button can change out from under you (in either direction) as the page finishes loading or starts refreshing, at which point your button click does exactly the opposite of what you wanted it to do (stopping when you wanted to reload, or loading yet again when you wanted to stop).
P.S. -- Thanks, everyone, for your feedback! (Score:1)
Re:Combination Stop/Reload button not a good idea (Score:1)
Must we continually bash a respected developer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, using the floating text input panel to write up this comment is "not too shabby". Alt dragging links is useful in some instances. Remembering window size, et al. I could go on and on. The thing is, for what I visit, Omniweb renders the sites excellently, at an acceptable speed and it filters out the garbage. What's to trash on this thing? And it's not as if the developer's going out and saying, "Ha ha ha! Look, fools, our browser doesn't support CSS
Also, I think part of NeXT's problem was they alienated developers. Not good. And it's happening again.