MacResearch

Firefox + Foxmarks

having more than one computer, foxmarks is essential to me

I've been using OmniWeb for a while now and I'm quite happy with it. It's crafted with all the care you'd expect from an Omni product.

Jez

I've used Omniweb for several years due to the features and the fact that it is as well-integrated with the OS as is Safari.

Truly, the feature set contains some of the most useful stuff that I can imagine. It starts with the thumbnail tabs (that's a deal-killer for me when considering other browsers) and extends to worksets, per-site preferences, ability to "lie" about its identity (on a per-site basis) so that if a site insists that you use IE, just tell OW to announce itself as IE, and a few other things that have probably become so second-nature to me by now that I can't even recall them off the top of my head. All I have to do to remember them is to use another browser for a while. Oh yea--killer ad blocking based on a very simple use of regular expressions, excellent bookmarking with searching, a good download manager, autofill on steroids, an easily-customizable feature called Shortcuts that I haven't seen in other browsers. Like Safari, it now uses resizable text boxes, but for years before this "new" feature, it has had the ability to open an entire new window for entering text into those little boxes.

By integration with the OS I mean e.g., cut-and-pasted text retains its style (Firefox fails this), Control-Command-d brings up the minidictionary, etc.).

It uses the same rendering engine as Safari so quality and speed are similar.

I'm pretty sure that I have tried every other browser on the Mac and always come back to OmniWeb. Why have I looked around if I'm so happy with OW? One reason: OW is the worst memory hog of all. It's no secret that every web browser ever made leaks memory like a sieve. Firefox 3 is currently the best that I've seen, and others have done more formal testing and have verified this. But Firefox has a _lot_ of problems on the Mac--I've made an extensive list just for my own enjoyment. Plus I have to add a bunch of plugins just to get a crappy approximation to a few of the OW features that I cant' live without, and the rest go undone.

So I stick with OW for the features and deal with the memory leaks by relaunching it once a day or so. The good news here is that it always remembers your open pages (in fact, it remembers the complete state of the entire browser, a part of its workset feature) so the relaunch is pretty painless.

I can only agree.

A typical OmniProduct in the best possible sense.

The killer feature for me is the per-site-preferences. In general I allow nothing (no cookies, java, javascript, plug-ins etc.). Then on per-site-basis I allow what the site needs, if I trust it.

BTW, other web-centric tools I do not want to live without:

- 1password
- DEVONagent

/Sven

Have you seen

Uses PDFKit to display PDFs in the browser.

http://code.google.com/p/firefox-mac-pdf/

Mostly Camino but i also use Safari,Firefox and Shiira.

Opera is faster than Omniweb, and has all of the features you listed there. i'm not sure if 9.5 for Mac is out yet, but even 9.2 can do all of that.

>"thumbnail tabs (that's a deal-killer for me when considering other browsers)"
Opera had that feature long before Omniweb did.

>"ability to "lie" about its identity (on a per-site basis)"
any browser can do that. there are extensions for others, but it comes with Opera by default.

>"OW is the worst memory hog of all."
I've never had any memory problems with Opera. and i'm sure i have less spare RAM than you do. (512MB and using Leopard)

I prefer Firefox because of superior cookie management, how easily one can customize it, and the addons that make using the web more efficient and pleasant. I believe that after using the web with the benefits of addons like Adblock Plus and NoScript, many users would simply not go back to using the web without these addons. It's true that one can add Privoxy to get many of the benefits of Adblock Plus, but the combination of the two in Firefox is unbeatable.