Product Reviews

OmniWeb is perhaps the last of the paid-for web browsers, but shelling out £16 gets you a solid browsing environment with a large number of unique features.

The biggest change in version 5.5 is the technology used to display pages, which is now powered by a slightly modified version of the WebKit system built into Mac OS X. This means pages should appear in OmniWeb more or less exactly the way they do in Safari and other WebKit-powered browsers.

This is good news because previous incarnations depended on less reliable display code and suffered from glitches and compatibility problems, especially with style sheets. These issues are largely eliminated now.

OmniWeb is still packed with features, which are looking better than ever. The best visual treat is the graphical tabs, which show tiny thumbnails of web pages in a drawer to one side

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of the viewing window. This is a lovely way to manage a large number of websites in one browsing session, but it eats up screen space that other browsers don't. You can switch it off and have a text list, if you like, but this still needs the drawer open so you don't recover any of that space. This won't be a problem if you have lots of screen space, but it might get a little irritating on MacBook screens, for example.

OmniWeb's other greatest hit is the way it remembers what you've been doing. Should you accidentally hit command-Q, when you relaunch the app it will automatically restore all the windows and tabs that you had open. (This isn't enabled by default, though: you need to check the 'Auto-save while browsing' widget in the Workspaces palette first.)

You can save any combination of windows and tabs as a Workspace, but only one Workspace can be visible at one time. Switching from one to the next is simple, and the concept itself very useful for, say, researching a particular topic. Per-site preferences are another genius touch, allowing you to choose exactly which sites you want to view without images or adverts, or with your own style sheet.

There's a shallow, but noticeable, learning curve for new OmniWeb users, which is a direct result of the innovation shown in its feature set. However, for people who spend all day browsing for a living, the curve and the cost of OmniWeb shouldn't be a barrier to buying it.