About a week ago I found a browser called OmniWeb developed by the Omni Group. I use two other appplications by them, OmniGraffle and OmniPlan. These people really deliver great applications to work with! I was excited when I saw that you can download a free browser developed by them. So here are my impressions after a week of extreme usage:

OmniWeb is powered with the webkit browser engine, the integrated developer tools and a really impressive Flash performance. I tested the performance of my Nimble example with Flash palyer 10.1 beta 2 in every usual browser. Safari 4, the latest webkit nightly build, Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5 dev build and Opera 10. No browser could deliver the same Flash plugin performance OmniWeb deliver

What I really like about this unknown browser is the workspace feature. You can open up hundreds up tabs in different windows in other browsers but you can not organize these windows as different workspaces which makes life so much easier sometimes. Another great thing is that OmniWeb recreates every workspace when you close and open the browser up again. That is a standard feature in my opinion and I miss it very much in Safari & webkit nightly buil

The tab organizing approach differs a lot from any other browser except for Opera 10. Opers 10 has this fancy tab bar which can look just like regular tabs, but you can also expand the height and see a little preview of the website. OmniWeb comes along with a  sidebar like tab bar. You can either have them shown as list items or with a little preview. This is a very nice approach but you really have to get used to it! One thing I miss is that the browser won’t let the user decide to show the tab bar on top. You can only switch between left and right.

Conclusion

OmniWeb is a great browser, the best thing about it is the Flash player performance. You should really try this one out! Note that this browser is mac only!

Tags: Browser