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Mozilla is a great browser, and version 1.7, the final of which was released last week, is the best Mozilla yet. While I am partial to Mozilla's leaner, browser-only siblings FireFox and Camino, the latest FireFox 0.9 build is for some reason not a happy camper on my iBook, and Camino is still a bit buggy and doesn't support drag&drop into Web page text fields, which is a requirement for me. Consequently, I think I'm going to be running Mozilla for routine Web work at least until upgraded builds of FireFox and Camino are released.
Mozilla 1.7, on the other hand, is rock solid, has demonstrated no bugginess yet in a few days' use, and looks classy with its subdued and tasteful cobalt blue interface theme. I don't use its Mail, Chat, and HTML authoring modules, but they are there for those who prefer Web application suites.
It's plenty fast too. Mozilla.org claims that Mozilla 1.7 beta tested 7% faster at startup, 8% faster at window open time, with 9% faster pageloading times, and the whole package is 5% smaller in binary size. Not to say that it isn't still humongous — a 15 MB download and the uncompressed application file is a whopping 43.5 MB. By comparison, Opera 7.5, which also incorporates a built-in email client, is only 9.3 MB.
One shortcoming of Mozilla 1.7 is that it still doesn't support OS X Services. Neither does FireFox, but Cocoa-based Camino does.
Mozilla 1.7 doesn't feel quite as speedy as FireFox or Camino but it's zippier than Safari or Internet Explorer, and more polished and stable than any of the above. If you want a fast, smooth-performing, rock-solid browser, then Mozilla 1.7 should suit you grandly.
Mozilla 1.7 New Features and Fixes
Browser
• Official Mozilla 1.7 builds for Windows, Linux, and Mac all contain the Talkback crash reporting utility. Help us make 1.7 the most stable release yet.
• A new option to prevent sites from using JavaScript to block the browser's context menu.
• Password Manager has a "show passwords" mode which will display saved passwords. You will need to enter your master password if you are using one.
• The "Set As Wallpaper" feature now has a confirmation dialog.
• Linux GTK2 builds have improved support for OS themes.
• Cookie dialogs have been reworked to make them more usable.
• Date handling, especially on OS X, has been improved.
• It is now possible to fine-tune Mozilla's pop-up blocking using two preferences (dom.popup_maximum and dom.popup_allowed_events) but there's no UI for that yet. Even without a UI, users should notice a greater variety of pop-ups blocked (primarily mouseover pop-ups) and a limit of 20 or so open at one time - regardless of whether pop-up blocking is active. This will provide some protection from sites that open hundreds of windows in a loop.
• Downloaded files are now moved to the target directory as soon as the user selects the desired location. This was the frequently reported bug 55690.
• There is now user interface to activate Smooth Scrolling (Preferences -> Appearance).
• Mozilla now supports basic FTP upload.
• Many improvements to Palm Sync.
• IMAP IDLE support has been added.
• Support for "MSN Authentication" and Secure Password Authentication using SSPI NTLM auth for SMTP and POP3.
• A new preference to "always use the default character encoding for replies" rather than using the encoding of the message being replied to.
• Improvements to performance of downloading, viewing, and saving mail messages.
• Support for multiple identities on the same mail account. See the Multiple Identity Support documentation for more details.
• Support for relative paths for mail folders in prefs.js. This makes it easier to copy profiles around without having to fix up prefs.js afterwards.
• You can now edit address lists containing "Last, First" style names.
• When composing mail, you can now use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through the To/Cc/Bcc list.
• On Mac OS X, attachment file names are no longer displayed in decomposed Unicode but are converted to composed Unicode.
• All Mozilla LDAP queries now default to using LDAPv3 (previously, they used LDAPv2). Mozilla should gracefully fall back to v2 if v3 isn't found.
Chatzilla
• Chatzilla now supports zooming of fonts with keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl + and Ctrl -), as well as with the View menu.
• Improved date handling; using the date/time format for the locale.
• Support for the /ignore command.
• The ability to change the font family and size.
• Working custom sounds on Windows and Linux.
• Improvements to the preferences panel and the user interface for half-op mode.
Under the Hood
• Size and performance have improved dramatically with this release. When compared to Mozilla 1.6, Mozilla 1.7 is 7% faster at startup, is 8% faster to open a window, has 9% faster page loading, and is 5% smaller in binary size.
• A long-standing bug with CSS backgrounds on table elements has been fixed (standards mode only).
• Support for Kerberos HTTP authentication using GSSAPI (benefits Unix-like platforms including Linux and OS X).
• Support for smb:// URLs using the gnome-vfs library (only enabled in GTK2+XFT Linux builds).
• Support for server push of XML documents using multipart/x-mixed-replace and XMLHttpRequest.
• Liveconnect now works when a Java applet's codebase is in a different domain.
• Very wide images (more than 4095px) will now display on Mac.
• Support for the CSS3 opacity property.
• Mozilla adds support for the onbeforeunload event. This lets web application developers add code that alerts the user about potential data-loss when closing a web application, or when leaving a HTML page with potentially sensitive information.
• This release has a new SVG backend. The feature is not yet enabled in the mozilla.org releases but developers may wish to compile with this feature enabled.
• Mozilla handles dynamic style changes much better
• Mozilla has upgraded the NSS libraries to version 3.9. NSS 3.9 passes all the NISCC SSL/TLS and S/MIME tests (1.6 million test cases of invalid input data) without crashes or memory leaks.
System requirements:
• Mac OS X 10.0 or higher
Mozilla is freeware
For more information, visit:
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/
OmniWeb 5.0 beta 8 Web Browser
Version 5 is a brand new OmniWeb, Cocoa-based on Apple's Safari Webkit, with upgraded bookmarks, history, Search Shortcuts, AutoFill, a new way to work with browser preferences, and a completely unique implementation of tabs.
OmniWeb started out as a browser for the NeXT operating system that OS X is based on, so it is really the original OS X browser. In its OS X iteration, it has always been a spectacular - looking program that utilized the Aqua theme and Cocoa features like the slide - out drawer. And it supports OS X Services.
OmniWeb doesn't just a clone of Safari. Its still has its pretty interface -- much more attractive than Safari's "brushed metal" theme in my opinion, and it still has many unique features. Probably my favorite is an interesting thumbnail images of in the Cocoa drawer, quite similarly to the way pages are managed in the OS X Preview PDF viewer.
When you create a new tab in your tab drawer, you can quickly switch between tabbed pages by clicking the thumbnail. Keep your browsing organized and productive by dragging thumbnails to change their position in the tab drawer, dragging links into the tab drawer to create new tabs, or even drag and drop tabs from one window to another. For those times when you have a lot of tabs in a single window, OmniWeb's tab drawer also features a list mode that lets you see a large number of tabs without having to scroll.
I have to say that I was disappointed with this eighth public preview release of OmniWeb 5. I encountered problems with stubborn pop-up windows that couldn't be banished from blocking page content (I eventually activated popup blocking in the Preferences), and had program quits while doing mundane surfing. It's impossible not to compare OmniWeb's performance to Shiira, which has had far less development time and is also based on Apple's Webkit. In fairness, Shiira is not nearly as ambitiously-featured as OmniWeb, but its polished, unbuggy performance after only a couple of months' development is remarkable.
Other Interesting OmniWeb features:
Workspaces
Imagine you have a lot of web pages open in your browser that you still have not viewed, but you need to restart your computer. You could bookmark all the pages and then load them all again when you next launched the browser, but that can take a lot of time and clutter up your bookmarks.
With OmniWeb's Workspaces feature, your individual browsing sessions can be saved in one convenient location. When you create a workspace, OmniWeb saves information like which web pages you have in your open in tabs, your history, and the location of the windows on your screen. You can drag and drop the contents of one workspace to another to further organize them. Take a snapshot of a workspace and instantly restore the workspace from the snapshot, clearing away any changes made to the workspace in the meantime. Workspace files can also be emailed to other OmniWeb 5 users allowing you to easily share many websites with others using a single file.
Site Preferences
OmniWeb has always offered control over your web browsing experience with features like pop-up and advertisement blocking. OmniWeb 5 adds Site Preferences — a tool for customizing your browsing. Site Preferences allows you to set preferences on a per-site basis, so you can view different web sites in different ways.
On each individual domain you can choose how to interact with the content - change the text size, tell OmniWeb where to save downloads for a particular site, even specify which sites you would like to allow pop-up windows and advertising on. Browse all your sites the way you want to browse them.
Powerful Bookmarks
Bookmarks in OmniWeb 5 have been thoroughly revamped. A new interface makes it easy to view and manage your favorite websites and adds several new features.
Using Rendezvous, OmniWeb allows you to share your bookmarks, making your favorites accessible to other OmniWeb users on your local area network. Special bookmark 'Collections' offer several new features including a listing of all web servers available on your LAN and filtered views of bookmarks and history allowing you to easily see your most visited web sites or all the bookmarked pages that have been updated since you last visited them.
Also new to OmniWeb 5 are special 'News Feed' bookmarks for viewing XML/RSS feeds from many popular web sites right in OmniWeb's bookmarks. Now you can always be on top of the latest website headlines without having to use an external application.
Bookmarks and history are now easier to search, with a search field built into the bookmarks interface. You can sort them based on a number of available attributes making it easy to find just what you are looking for.
One of OmniWeb's most powerful features, Shortcuts, has been extended to bookmarks allowing you to specify a keyword for each bookmark. Then when you want to load that page, just type in the keyword and OmniWeb loads the bookmark for you.
If you click in a search field on a site like Google or the Internet Movie Database, you can select an "Add Search" icon at the bottom of your browser window. This allows you to create a shortcut to easily search the site in the future without loading it first.
OmniWeb has always allowed you to save space on your toolbar by using the location field for shortcuts in addition to URLs, but for those who prefer it you can now put a separate Search Shortcut field in your toolbar where all your search shortcuts will be available from a drop down menu. Just choose your shortcut, then type your search word and you're on your way.
Page Marking
Page marking allows you to 'mark' a web page for fast access. If you mark a page while you're browsing, OmniWeb remembers it for you. When you want to go back or forward in your browsing session, you can instantly jump to your marked pages - no matter how many additional sites you have visited. With page marking, you can increase your browsing efficiency by navigating through to the important pages you're viewing more quickly, and with more accuracy.
The OmniWeb 5 beta is a reasonably quick download at 4.9 MB. It doesn't require a formal installation like Safari does -- you just mount the disk image and drag the program into the Applications Folder. The browser starts up quickly. There is a very nice Preferences dialog which works the same way as the OS X System Preferences do. There are many configuration options.
OmniWeb can import bookmarks from Safari or Internet Explorer. I am not blown away by it's Bookmark implementation (or Safari's for that matter). I prefer what the Camino folks have done with Bookmarks, and among Safari clones, the new Shiira makes clever use of the Cocoa drawer.
New in OmniWeb 5.0 beta 8
Highlights
• Fixed a large number of crashers and hangers, and also made OmniCrashCatcher better at gathering information about crashes.
• Corrected a problem that affected Site Preferences for domains like
• OmniWeb should no longer accept click on links for following the link when the window was in the background. The window just comes forward, the link is not followed.
Bookmarks & History
• May have corrected an issue where the dock icon could get out of sync with the actual number of unviewed bookmarks. If you still see this issue in beta 8 please let us know.
• Fixed an issue with updating the History menu after clearing History, and eliminated empty 'Today' menu item when there is no History to display.
• The Clear History menu item is now disabled when there is no History.
• Fixed an issue where deleting a bookmark would cause the Favorites item in the Bookmarks menu to disappear until you restarted OmniWeb.
Workspaces
• Fixed an issue where workspace names could include a "/" character and could be an empty string.
Cache
• Fixed a bug that could corrupt the cache when flushing it.
Downloads
• Corrected an accidental change introduced in beta 7 that prevented more than one download from happening at a time.
• The downloads window will once again scroll to new downloads when they start under all circumstances.
Interface
• Fixed a few issues that could prevent Page Icons from displaying correctly (favicons).
• We now display the application icon when the current browser window/tab is empty and you can no longer search the empty browser window using Google.
• Improved menu validation in a few situations.
• Fixed issues with the path popup on browser windows (hold command and click on the title bar icon).
CoreGraphics Text Renderer
• Fixed an issue that could sometimes cause ghosting around selected text.
Forms
• Fixed a problem with dragging text to and within TEXTAREA elements.
• Fixed a crasher when trying to Undo editing in a form.
• Fixed an issue that prevented text input into form fields from displaying if the page was still loading.
Preferences
• Renamed an older preference for opening links from other applications (now hidden) so the behavior is no longer inherited from previous versions of OmniWeb.
• Fixed a problem with the 'Override page styles' preference not reverting when resetting preferences.
• Corrected issues with the Bookmarks preferences for synchronization which could be enabled for .Mac even if you had not entered your information into the .Mac pane of System Preferences.
Other
• Resources in the Page Info panel can once again be dragged to other applications or copied to the clipboard. This gets the URL for the resource, not the resource itself.
• Corrected a problem with the default web browser control in General preferences. A recent Security Update from Apple changed the behavior of Launch Services and it would no longer tell us what the default web browser was unless the application had been 'approved' by having been manually launched after the update was applied.
• Fixed a bug that could cause a new window to open when switching into OmniWeb after it had been hidden, even if there was already a browser window open.
• We now correctly honor the threshold for antialiased text as set in the Appearance pane of System Preferences. You can still override this in OmniWeb using the AppleAntiAliasingThreshold default applied to OmniWeb's preference domain.
• Fixed a problem where the 'Go Back' contextual menu item on page sometimes would not.
Known Issues
Last updated on Friday June 18, 2004 for OmniWeb 5.0 beta 8.
This is an incomplete list meant to cover the most commonly reported issues in the current version of OmniWeb 5.0.
User Interface
• Can't scroll past selected item in Network Activity
• Some page content can occasionally draw over the toolbar
Other
• Some websites have issues with their browser detection code and you may experience problems with all or parts of the various sites when using OmniWeb. To work around this, using Site Preferences (command-option-comma while on the affected site), set OmniWeb to identify as Safari using the Identity settings in the 'Other' site preference tab. The site should then work correctly once you reload the current page. The following sites are known to require this:
• Apple .Mac HomePage slideshows will not display correctly. This is a bug with .Mac and we are working with Apple to have the issue corrected.
• Hotmail.com
• Yahoo! Maps
• Links to the iTunes Music store will currently fail in OmniWeb because of some JavaScript code Apple uses to work around a bug in Safari.
• Following a recent Apple Security Update, you will no longer be able to add new applications to OmniWeb's Safe List found in Downloads preferences until you have manually launched them at least once.
• OmniWeb is not yet compatible with Google Gmail. We have an update planned for release after OmniWeb 5.0 final that will bring compatibility with this site.
• Opening a PDF or Word file into a background tab when you have the PDF Browser plug-in or the Word browser plug-in installed will lead to a crash.
• Help files for OmniWeb 5.0 are not yet included along with the application.
• OmniWeb 5.0 includes our customized versions of WebCore v85 and JavaScriptCore v85. We will be merging with the latest version of these frameworks from Apple in a future version of OmniWeb to be released after 5.0 final.
• Find does not always start at the top of the view, but rather the document
• Whitespace is not collapsed when copying text to pasteboard
System requirements:
Requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later.
OmniWeb 5.0 will sell for $29.95.
Upgrades from previous versions of OmniWeb will be $9.95.
For more information, visit:
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/5/
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