OmniWeb 4.5 beta 1 is Out

and available for download from the Omni Group. OmniWeb was our favorite web browser for Mac OS X when it first came out as the only web browser that was Cocoa-native, i.e. uses Mac OS X's fabulous Quartz graphics. Now there are also the open-source Mozilla Project's Camino and Apple's Safari that are also Cocoa-native. However, we have never used OmniWeb routinely because it can't handle the javascript of our Netscape Messenger Express webmail server. But that has changed with v4.5b1!

The latest OmniWeb version adopted the open source WebCore and JavaScriptCore frameworks from Apple, bringing greatly improved support for the latest Internet standards like CSS, HTML, XHTML, and JavaScript to OmniWeb v4.5b1. OmniWeb now appears to work perfectly with our Netscape server and we have a real dilemma--use Safari, which still has a few quirks, or OmniWeb.

For the time being we are going to use OmniWeb to see how well it does overall. Preliminarily, we already miss Safari's use of Keychain that is not yet implemented in OmniWeb. We also miss surfing with tabs. In terms of complex web sites, OmniWeb 4.5b1 does not do as well as Safari with the difficult Travelocity web site.