I hate to sound so dismal, but as said, web browsers are boring, and there isn’t really any reason for the general public to purchase a web browser, when there are already many quality ones that are available free of charge – Safari, Firefox and Chrome.
Similar situation with email clients. Outside of enterprise (which is mainly chained to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange), there’s not much need to purchase an email client when you can either 1) Use it online – webapp version, or 2) Built-in (Mail.app on OS X, or Mail on Windows 8.1).
That may be the case for some people. My personal perspective is a little different.
I spend my whole working day in front of a computer. The web is an integral part of my work. Thus the way I use a web browser does make a difference in terms of productivity.
When I switched to the Mac platform I was an Opera user. I found that Opera on Mac was extremely unstable. After months of suffering (I really liked Opera and found its features indispensable) I started exploring different others. Firefox is rather slow on Mac, and it does not feel well. Chrome used to be very fast and stable, but its lack of a vertical tab bar and rather huge memory consumption made it unusable for the number of tabs I keep open all day. Safari was fast and stable, but just too spartanic for my needs. OW was just the one browser that did it all right.
I feel it totally reasonable to spend money on a software tool that I use all day and that makes some difference on my daily productivity. And I would not be too surprised to see that others come to the same conclusion.
I’m not saying whether it’s reasonable for me or you – I have no qualm with paying a significant amount of money (investing) in terms of tools (hence why I like OmniGroup’s suite of tools),
The thing is, whether the general public would.
I don’t think they would, as I espoused above.
And the two sales from us two – $20 or $40 (depending on the price), does not justify the significant costs of developing the software.
I first started using omniweb when I owned a NeXT color workstation. I came back to Apple when Apple bought NeXT because i loved (love) Omniweb. Farther down in this thread I see the issue of monetizing Omniweb when browsers are given away - though it wasn’t always like that.
I have an idea for marketing Omniweb! What distinguishes Omni from Firefox, etc. is the “View in Source Editor.” The little box is perfect for editing and building a web site—especially for a trial and error beginner.
In other words, Omnigroup should market Omniweb as a website builder that also happens to be the best browser in the marketplace!!! Yes there are lots of semi-automatic programs for website building, but they cost way more than $2.99 in the Apple store (My recommended sales price).
That is my marketing strategy for Omniweb - to turn our favorite browser also the only browser people pay to use. . . . good slogan . . . . “The only browser in the marketplace people pay for.”
I am a poet not by any stretch a programmer but I built my website using the omniweb source editor.
One more issue thought. In earlier versions of omniweb at the far right in the toolbar there was a sot for Google and maybe some other search engines. How do I reestablish the search engine slot? It’s gone and I cannot figure how to get it back. Thanks in advance.
Playing devil’s advocate again, why pay when you can get it for free? Why pay for Sublime Text when you can get Atom.io?
Web browsers are commoditised (there’s a reason why Windows, a paid OS, is used more than Ubuntu, a free and open-source OS), much like email clients, and calendars.
There’s no way you can manage to extract a revenue source from a large number of people, other than either 1) Subsidising it from another business (E.g. Google Chrome --> Google Search; Firefox --> Donations; Safari --> (Mac) OS X) or 2) Have ads in the browser, or 3) Lose money on development costs.
When you think about software development, yes, there’s the ideological/idealistic aspect of it – improving peoples’ lives, by making things either easier, or more efficient, thus increasing productivity. But on the other hand, there’s also the business considerations as well. OmniGroup is not a non-profit and they are not a charity. Yes, their products touch our lives and improve it by increasing our productivity, but the business aspect is still a consideration, even if its considerably reduced (make a good product --> get customers --> get sales --> revenue), as opposed to chasing money for the sake of money.
In light of this, I fail to see how OmniGroup is able to focus on delivering OmniWeb, unless they are taking a developmental cost loss on themselves (possibly creating the halo effect, but is it worth it? Why bother to download yet-another-browser from a-company-you’ve-never-heard-of-unless-you’re-in-the-productivity-sphere, if you already have Safari built in your OS, or if you’ve heard of Chrome?).
This is in reply to savantier. Browsers are free, so why pay. True enough. Web site building programs are not free. The omniweb browser is the strongest, likely the fastest browser in the marketplace.
The idea is to market the source editor for building websites on your own as a trial and error newbie instead of spending a bundle on some program. The $2.99 suggested retail is really paying for a simple to read online manual on how to use the source editor.
Want to build your own website with your own trial and error design? omniweb is the most elegant tool to use. Yes a cheapskate could download the free browser and figure out how the source editor works but lots of people would pay.
I am very interested in the Mozilla feature, but it looks to me it is not for the faint hearted - not for a newbie dummy like me though I have not tried it. i’m interested because i have a flash movie I designed (someone else wrote the code) and what ‘eye’ set out to do was / is years ahead of everybody.
The Mozilla app might be just what I (and my old flash programmer friend) need to smoothy migrate our movie into a download for all mobile devices whirled wide.
But you just cannot get off the stick with your anti omni attitude. Omniweb is better than Firefox. Way better! Omniweb survives regardless. My marketing idea is to charge $2.99 and that is for a simple written instruction pamphlet so a novice can use the source editor to build a website!
Obviously one could obtain the browser without the simple how to build your own state of the art website manual and figure it out for yourself. What a winning sales approach! Get the browser for free or spend $2.99 for the simple instructions on using the source editor to trial and error your own website. Maybe the ninjas would add a half dozen cool templates. Optiona,l and people will spend the $2.99 and then all the ninjas will be driving Jaguars.
Thing is though, development is expensive. It costs money to produce code for apps. If OmniGroup sinks in money to create a browser (even if its based off the open-source project ‘Webkit’), it costs money. If they are unable to recoup the money, that’s not ideal.
As said, OmniGroup is a business. It wouldn’t make sense for them to continue working on apps that have zero business viability (see: OmniGraphSketcher, OmniDazzle, OmniDictionary, …). It would be akin to charging into a battle that you’ll know that you’re going to lose.
But the Omni Ninjas, at least the omni founder have been working on “updating” omniweb so evidently the omni gang does not agree. Otherwise omni would not be updating omniweb. You are wrong. A company looking for a group to do some work has to be impressed with omniweb, regardless of sales, etc. It’s the best. The browser itself in a narrow sense does not have business viability in that people aren’t going to pay for what every body else is giving away but the browser is a living advertisement for a talented group of programmers!
My idea is to charge $2.99 for an online manual for source editor tricks of the trade enabling a person who is only starting out to actually hand build a cool website. So you download the browser and it’s yours to keep, but in the event you are a five year old with six months web experience you might want to invest $2.99. Maybe 500 people would do that every week. That’s all. Lunch money in the big picture.
It’s about passion. People love the software they created, that’s why they keep working on it in their spare time.
Yes, software development is expensive. That’s why selling a product that only very few people are willing to pay for does not make sense. In the moment you’re taking money you’re responsible and obliged to fix bugs etc., and if even that is not going to be covered by what people pay for it, you’ll end up with a loss.
Thus I like my own idea about a donation-based system. Once there’s enough money collected for a feature it is going to be created, not more, not less. The product stays free, thus no obligations for the makers. People like myself who are willing to spend some money in something they really like may end up seeing some long waited-for progress once there are enough others who feel the same way.
And that has been the thrust of my argument so far in this thread.
It would be flippantly rude and outright arrogant to think that a developer would work for free out of pure altruism. That’s not how a business works.
Yes, passion for development is important. Yes, OmniGroup is brilliant at developing productivity apps (as they have been, since the NeXT era). But business considerations are important as well. OmniGroup is not publicly funded (by the government, or a NGO), and as such, business considerations arise.
Do not conflate ‘business rationality’ and common sense with, as I quote, an ‘anti-Omni attitude’.
The theory of market failure (as illustrated by open-source projects like OpenSSL. Large web companies and established firms (such as the ones in Fortune 500) use it daily, as part of their internal or external infrastructure, yet the amount of donations towards the project is pitiful.) shows why your example of a donation-based OmniWeb is clearly a bad business decision.
Why would someone pay for a feature to be implemented when they can just sit back, wait, and let other people pay and get those features for free?
I know I wouldn’t. I know you wouldn’t either (you might say you will, for the sake of supporting your own argument, but in reality, you would treat it as essentially free software and ignore the nature of it being shareware/donationware). It goes against the implicit rational decision-making tenet in economics.
Ever wonder why essential infrastructure (such as lighthouses, roads and street lighting) have to be built and paid for by governments (through taxation of the general populace, hence pooling the costs of these essential infrastructure), and not through private sponsorship, or, as you propose, donation?
The economic theory of free riding combines with the earlier principle of market failure to illustrate why such an example is unfeasible.
Going back to the earlier question I posed… If street lighting was paid for through a voluntary donation by the community (taking into account the nature of street lighting as a(n economic) ‘public good’) then the street lighting would stay continually unlit, for those who pay stand to lose (in terms of money), while those who don’t pay stand to gain (street lighting without payment). Due to the problem of free-riding, and market failure, it doesn’t make sense to follow the developmental model that you have proposed, unless you want OmniGroup to lose money (and more significantly, developmental time, which could be used to develop other apps in the OmniGroup productivity suite, or revamp existing ones, such as OmniPlan for OS X).
Your idea of a donation-based funded OmniWeb is interesting prima facie, but it won’t work in practice.
Should Apple develop Aperture for free (and incur significant developmental costs, in light of the decreasing number of users for the app), or release it as a donation-based software?
Should Microsoft do that as well, for Microsoft Office? Make it donation-based software? Scale this question to enterprise software. What about Oracle’s enterprise offerings? Is donation-based software development the way forward?
I’m not sure who I am responding to in this thread. I got an email— I guess savant tea yay. "It would be flippantly rude and outright arrogant to think that a developer would work for free out of pure altruism. That’s not how a business works.”
“New World Hors D’oeuvres” is one of my creative works. Excluding a page where I am quoting “Little Bush,” aka George W., in the whole 224 pages two words are absent: “if” and “think,” which are close to “to”and “would.” The boss of bosses at omni has been updating and upgrading omniweb browser—not a future maybe to do or would, rather past tense “done.”
The state of the art browser is given free, because the marketplace for browsers demands it. What I have been talking about is not a to / would but can do (in a blink past tense) — the marketing strategy is thus — for $2.99 you get a mini - instruction manual focused of the “SOURCE EDITOR,” which is also free and an element of the free browser. Also included for $2.99 is a tool bar explanation, to compliment the Source Editor explanation. The target of this is any newbie computer wanna be website builder age five to fifty. Not for seasoned geeks who who dream C++ but a five year old kid who wants to learn how to build a five page website in twenty minutes . . . a super surprise for mom and dad.
Is how the source editor works when constructing a website ‘software development?’ It’s done already! The $2.99 manual could be prepared in a few hours. Were the omni boss to award me $0.25 for every sale inspired by omniweb’s source editor, a value added feature, I will be driving a bought and paid for two seater Jaguar within the year. The niche market newbie website building and design market I see is people who think C++ is their grade in geography, Ubunto, a near extinct tribe who thrived for centuries in the Bolivian jungle.
Just updated to the latest test build of OW yesterday and I’ve been using it since then without a single crash, and everything works great.
My only issue is that since using Safari for the past 6 months or so I’ve gotten used to a few of the nicer new features, like icloud keychain and bookmark syncing. but at least those aren’t dealbreakers, I just have to use keychain access to access all the passwords that got saved into my icloud keychain. And I can still have my bookmark syncing if I import between safari and OW periodically.
The only other huge is that I have gotten used to the way zooming works in Safari, it is much nicer than the way it is done in omniweb. I’ve found in the past day that using omniweb’s built in zoom breaks a lot of pages. But luckily it’s possible to use safari style zoom by creating a custom stylesheet and setting it in your global site prefs, with the following code:
body { zoom: 130%; }
Just adjust the zoom level to your liking.
Oh, and textareas aren’t resizable which is really annoying. But I can deal with it.
I hope so as I’d like to make a small request for OmniWeb 6 to recognise the “AddressAutocompleteMinimumWidth” defaults key. I have tried setting it but it keeps disappearing form the plist file so I guess it’s not supported at the moment.
Right-click somewhere on the toolbar (but not in a text area) and this should bring up the ‘Customize Toolbar…’ option. After selecting that, a sheet showing all of the available toolbar options should appear including the one called ‘Search Field’. Drag it onto your toolbar and click Done.
I am hoping that once the dust settles from all the work on the paid app Ken will find some time to give OW a little love. Works ok, but crashes every time I close a window (not a tab, thankfully).
