Ditching OmniWeb

Five Reasons I’m Ditching OmniWeb and Going Back to Safari

1. OmniWeb doesn’t behave with my bank’s website.

   I use ING Direct for my bank, and they have a login system that sort of makes me not care if I see how much money I have. First, enter customer number. Second, answer two security questions. Third, verify login images and phrase. Fourth, click the numbers or enter the corresponding characters for your PIN. ING offers the option of “registering” a computer so that the security questions don’t show up. OmniWeb can’t seem to understand this, so I’m stuck with one more step than I need to have in my login routine.

2. OmniWeb doesn’t handle desired popups correctly.

   I like the popup Ma.gnolia bookmarklet. In OmniWeb, even with “Only when not requested” in OmniWeb > Preferences > Ad Blocking, it still opens in a new tab. If I invoke a bookmarklet, that means I requested the popup! Other bookmarklets behave similarly.

3. OmniWeb doesn’t have a progress indicator.

   I like to see the loading progress of the page I’m visiting, particularly if it’s moving slowly. Helpful to see if it’s just a large amount to load or if it’s not making progress at all. Saves me time and frustration.

4. OmniWeb’s Tab System

   I don’t like OmniWeb’s tab system. Displaying the tabs in a sidebar is somewhat cool, but moving tabs to a vertical orientation apparently necessitated Omni’s change of keyboard tab navigation so that command+up/down arrow switches to a new tab. I have used this same key combination in browsers since I can remember to jump to the top or bottom of a page. I keep trying this in OmniWeb, and it’s jarring when I go to a new tab instead of what I expect. It usually takes me a few seconds, too, to figure out what happened because the content of the viewport did indeed change, but not as I expected.

5. OmniWeb’s Autofill Functionality Is Flaky at Best

   When I come across a form in Safari, I can type in the first thing they ask for and as long as it’s a pretty standard form, Safari happily populates the fields, and the data is rarely incorrect. When it is, it’s just a couple places. Contrast this with OmniWeb. When I go to a website, if I want to autofill a form, I have to click a small icon at the bottom right of the window. And even then, it might not fill any of the fields. For instance, I just tried it on the Barnes & Noble checkout page, and it wouldn’t autofill.

OmniWeb is a nice looking app with some features that are missing from the shipping version of Safari. (Here’s hoping Safari 3 in Leopard is much improved.) But, Saft steps up to the plate and fills those gaps at a lower price than OmniWeb. (Unless you bought it on sale like I did when I got my family pack for $9.95.) What Omni has to realize is that if you are going to ask people to pay for a browser, it has to be light years ahead of the free alternatives. And with Safari being serviceable for most users and Firefox being so extensible there’s really very little it couldn’t do with the right coaxing, Omni will have to either innovate like crazy to make OmniWeb irresistible or give up trying to charge for a web browser like Opera did.