On the plus side, OmniWeb has what is probably the best session save and resume implementation of any browser, with its excellent Workspaces feature that automatically saves your open windows and tabs (including their sizes and positions on screen) and restores them when you relaunch OmniWeb, as well as enabling you to manually store your own arbitrary sets of workspaces for later recall and quickly switch between them with a key shortcut or menu choice. I still don’t like icon tabs, and OmniWeb (on the G4 Pismos) also sometimes goes into spasms of unresponsiveness while it’s executing tasks. (I hasten to emphasize that the Intel versions of all these browsers are gratifyingly speedy on Core 2 Duo machines like my MacBook.)Ĭonsequently, I will keep using it, possibly for the duration, although I’ll be pleasantly surprised if any major browsers are still actively being developed for Tiger by the end of 2011. In general, I’m finding OmniWeb, which is based on Apple’s WebKit, a more satisfactory surfing tool on Tiger than any of the Mozilla Gecko-based siblings ( Firefox 3.6.13, SeaMonkey 2.0.11, and Camino 2.06), although it’s no ball of fire speed-wise on these old 550 MHz G4s. I still use one or the other for web posting and certain other chores, but the writing is in the wall there as well. SeaMonkey and Camino both still officially support OS X 10.4, but they seem to get slower and slower on the old 550 MHz G4 Pismos with each incremental version upgrade. Opera 11 doesn’t support PowerPC 10.6.3 is the end of the road for Tiger (and OS X 10.5 Leopard) on PPC Macs. Opera 10.6.3 is pretty good – fast and quite stable – but it has a compatibility bug with PowerPC that causes it to bog down badly with long paroxysms of spinning beach ball when entering text in fields, such as when doing Google or Bing (a surprisingly good search engine) searches. None of the browsers I’m using with Tiger is really satisfactory, and I’ve long suspected that browser compatibility will probably be what ultimately ends the Pismo’s run as a production workhorse. The thumbnail tabs are still an annoyance, but I can tolerate that, especially for speed and stability on Tiger, which OmniWeb 5 has. I’ve been using OmniWeb for the past couple of months or so, and I’m happy to report how pleasantly surprised I’ve been at how nice-working OmniWeb is on both the Pismo (550 MHz G4, 1 GB RAM, OS X 10.4.11) and on my Late 2008 Unibody MacBook (Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz, 4 GB RAM, OS X 10.6.6). As a Tiger holdout, I appreciate any developer still taking an active interest in supporting the last Mac OS X version that (officially) supports G3 and slower (than 800 MHz) G4 Macs, for which I give the Omni Group developers appreciative credit, so I thought OmniWeb deserved a fresh new evaluation However, OmniWeb is one of the rapidly diminishing selection of actively developed browsers that still supports Tiger. I also find it particularly tedious and counter-intuitive having to navigate there to close tab windows. Low End Mac viewed in OmniWeb on a 1024 x 768 display.Įven with the tab drawer reduced to about its minimum useful size, I still can’t get all of Low End Mac’s home page to show on my Pismo’s 1024 x 768 display I have to scrolling sideways. You can switch to a text-only tab list, but it still lives in a vertical slide-out drawer, which can be positioned at either the left or right of the browser window, still eating up the same amount of precious screen real estate for us small-display laptop users, which is my main complaint about the thumbnails – not the pictures. That fee had been one reason for my looking elsewhere, but it wasn’t my biggest objection to OmniWeb I dislike thumbnail bookmarks tabs. OmniWeb was also the last major commercial software browser holdout (except for iCab, currently at version 4.8a, which remains nagware), finally dropping its licensing fee in February 2009. OmniWeb was originally developed for the NextStep platform in 1995, then migrating to OpenStep, and finally to Mac OS X. In my quest for an up-to-date browser to use in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on my two old Pismo PowerBooks, one that I had consistently passed over was OmniWeb, which was the very first OS X web browser out of the blocks a decade ago.
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