Cool Mac Gear

OmniWeb, one of the first OS X native browsers to come on stream a couple of years back, has always been praised for its spectacular good looks and innovative features like multi-threading, and its true OS X nativity being written using Apple's Cocoa frameworks, but as newer OS X native browsers came on stream, its performance, especially speed and lack of full JavaScript support, began lagging farther and farther behind speedsters like Mozilla, Chimera/Camino, and most recently Apple's own Safari browser.

Commendably, The Omni Group has risen to the competitive challenge, and completely overhauled OmniWeb by incorporating the open source WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks from Apple (the same as are used in Safari), bringing greatly improved support for the latest Internet standards like CSS, HTML, XHTML, and JavaScript to OmniWeb 4.5, of which the public beta 1 build was released this week.

I downloaded a copy last evening (a modest 4.1 MB) and gave it a test drive. My first impressions are generally positive.

Installation was a breeze. OmniWeb stores its preferences and other support files outside of the actual application itself, so it's safe to overwrite any existing copies of OmniWeb on your hard drive with a newer version. Your preferences, bookmarks, and history will be retained. I just mounted the disk image and dragged the OmniWeb Application to my Applications Folder, replacing the copy of OmniWeb 4.1 that was there.

The OmniWeb interface still looks great. The slide-out bookmarks drawer is still there, and the very OS X-like Preferences dialogue still works slickly. OmniWeb 4.5 also imported my latest bookmarks from Safari with no hassle.

Speed-wise, OmniWeb 4.5b1 seems quite lively. I didn't do any timed comparisons, but page loads of Websites I visit frequently seemed to be in the same ballpark in terms of quickness as Safari and Camino. JavaScript worked fine on the pages I checked it on.

However, there is still work to be done. A story page on a local newspaper Website hung in mid-load, and seemed to lock up with the little OS X star-wheel spinning interminably. I tried the same page with Safari and it loaded almost instantly. I also encountered the same spontaneous page reload glitch that afflicted the first public beta build of Safari. Using OmniWeb 4.5b1 you are frequently reminded that it's an early beta.

Another thing that the Omni Group folks really need to address as a priority is the lack of tabbed browsing in OmniWeb. Like many other Web users, I've become addicted to tabbed browsing, and I can't imagine going back to using any browser without it for regular surfing duty. I hope tabbed browsing is high on the OmniWeb development team's to do list.

OmniWeb 4.5 can still only save Web pages as html, with no plain text option. This shortcoming is somewhat mitigated by OS X Services, and these days I usually just dump text saves into DEVONThink, but I do appreciate iCab's ability to save pages as plain text, html, or Web archives.

Nevertheless, despite the early rough edges, OmniWeb 4.5 is a substantial improvement over its predecessors, and promises to become a serious player again in the OS X browser field. If Microsoft's rumored abandonment of the standalone browser market comes to pass, indie browser developers like Omni Group can only benefit from Internet Explorer's departure.

For the complete inventory of changes, enhancements, known issues, and bugfixes in OmniWeb 4.5b1, you can read the release notes here:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/releasenotes/content.html

System requirements:
• Mac OS X 10.2 and later

OmniWeb is $29.95 shareware

Download:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/download/

The infamous, frustrating Blue & White OS X upgrade problem solved!

From Bruce Williamson

Charles,

The problem I had with OS 10.2.x upgrades on my Blue & White G3 turned out to be a "Generic USB FDD (UD-376)" FLOPPY DRIVE I had connected through my Belkin hub. It had worked fine with 10.2 but after that no dice. Into the real, not virtual trash it goes—although I wonder if there IS a better brand USB floppy drive that WILL continue to work with the upgrades? The way I discovered the path to the solution was by accidentally turning on Disk Utility and noticing that the icon for this drive kept appearing and disappearing and a day later I finally snapped to the fact that the System was trying unsuccessfully to read the connected floppy drive! OS 10.2.6 here I come!

Hi Bruce;

Glad you found the problem.

If you find a less-problematical floppy drive, let me know. I'm in the hunt for one for my iBook.

Charles

RE: The Swap File Shift Conundrum

From Andy Hector

Well, I don't know how you prefer to compute, but have you ever thought of leaving your drive unpartitioned next time you reformat or when you get a new drive? I'm sure you know that both OS X and OS 9 are both bootable if installed on the same disk. You can also say goodbye to having to copy data from many different partitions that act like separate drives.

Like I said, I don't know the specifics of how you prefer to run your computer, but I'm someone who was using two partitions back in the early days of OS X (10.0) and now I've found it much easier to put everything on one disk with the arrival of 10.1 and 10.2.

-- Andy

Hi Andy;

Different strokes for different folks.

When I bought my 700 MHz iBook at New Year's, I decided to try using it without the drive partitioned. That lasted a whole three weeks, and I hated it.

I missed being able to keep my stuff segregated. OS X native and Classic versions of the same software located on the same partition with both X and Classic bootable systems in some cases conflicted with each other. I soon threw in the towel, erased the drive, and reformatted it with three partitions, giving a nice 11 MB or so to my OS X partition.

I don't crticize anyone's differing preferences with regard to partitioning, but it works for me.

Charles

Invisible swap files. My good luck (Knock on wood).

From Flatpainter

Hello, Mr. Moore.

I've been lucky in my OSX use. My G4 350 PCI Mac has 768MB of RAM and I've never gotten page in/outs. I've been happy running 10.1.4 will upgrade to the latest with purchase of my next Mac.

I have done heavy Illustrator work in Classic with no worries except the usual Classic issues. I absolutely prefer OSX for general use, and once I get my 15-inch Al Powerbook this next rev (hope and dream), I'll also upgrade some of my Adobe work apps at that time.

I think I have had few problems with VM access because of my original installation strategy. I have the original 10 Gig drive as master and during my original installation, I told it to reserve a 1 Gig swap disc as one of my partitions (3G for OSX, 4 for Classic folder, etc. and the remainder for files). I also have a second internal drive (30 Gig) and an external 40 Gig firewire.

I've never needed to defragment or run any really intensive maintenance (Knock on wood) and think the 1 Gig swap disc is the reason. Or maybe I've just been lucky.

Thanks for all your good commentary and support our platform of choice.

Flatpainter

Hi FP;

I expect that the dedicated swap disk does help cut down markedly on fragmentation.

However, I think you might be surprised if you ran the top command in the Terminal (type top and press Enter) to check the Processes log, which records (among many other things) the number of pageins and pageouts. ;-)

I just checked mine, and in the past five days since my last restart, there have been 19227 pageins, and 36543 pageouts.

Charles

Swap Space

From Joseph Ballo

"I would be interested in hearing from any readers who have used any of these utilities. "

I have experimented with two of the utilities that you mentioned as well as 'doing it myself' my editing the configuration file /etc/hostconfig. The two I have used were Swapcop and [currently] Swapswapvm. I stopped using the first due to 'feelings' of instability but have had no problems whatsoever with the second.swapswapvm. It works.

But do you need it? As said there is no need to guess about the need for goosing the vm system. IF there are no increases in pageouts and there is no increase in the number of swap files beyond swapfile0 then I would suppose that since you are really not using the vm system there is no need to goose it up. But if these two conditions are present then a separate swapfile[s] may be in order. However unless your system's hard disk is Very Holy and Blessed as was St Martin de Porres, the heads cannot be in two places at the same time. So if the backing store is on the same physical disk as the system [where the /var/vm directory resides], then while the heads of the hard disk are reading the backing store, they cannot be reading or writing anything else. This of course does not obtain if the backing store resides on its own hard disk with its own spindle and its own heads.

My ancient beige G3 has three hard disks in it one is Master on IDE bus 0, and another is Slave on IDE bus 1. I have an IBM 2gigB internal SCSI drive with ID=0 and this is where the backing store resides [named, not too cleverly 'SWAP'] It is now the home of the backing store, and there via swapswapvm. Works just fine. Hope this is of some value and sorry, as always, for being tedious and verbose.

Dr Joe

Hi Dr. Joe;

Thanks muchly for the helpful tutorial, which helps confirm some impressions I have been developing. I checked "Go to Folder" and found six swapfiles, all 76.2 MB in size, which works out to 457.2 MB, which kinda reveals where my free disk space is going (at this writing down to 744 MB free). I've also has 36543 pageouts. in five days. Moving the swap files to another partition might help I guess, but there is the head travel issue you mention.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore