I had been under the impression that OW was pretty much abandonware, and then today I clicked on Check For Updates. I put my G4 iMac running Tiger out to pasture a month ago in favor of a new Mac Mini running Mavericks.
I paid for OW in November 2006 and used it as my primary browser for years. I LOVE the side tabs—this was the killer feature that made me adopt OW. I also like that I can tweak the settings for different sites. But I’ve also become very frustrated by an ongoing bug. Starting in October 2008, OW would fail to paginate properly when printing a hard copy from some websites. I could fix this by trashing my plist, but that meant losing my autofill data. I’ve reported this bug a number of times over the years, and it’s never been fixed. At one point I also suggested to the support ninjas that autofill data should be put in its own dedicated file so it wouldn’t be lost when the plist is trashed.
I put in some time as a contract software tester 20 years ago, so I know that fixing bugs isn’t a matter of waving a magic wand, but IMO fixing bugs is in a developer’s job description. This is a pretty annoying bug, which I imagine affects other users also. OW was paid at the time I reported the bug, and as I said, I paid for OW. As mbert says, if you take money, you need to offer support. I don’t want to be rude, but if I sound a little testy on this issue, I am.
I recently paid for upgrade licenses for several apps. I bought a $50 lifetime license for the MailMate mail client—haven’t had the time to set it up yet—when I could have continued with Apple Mail for free:
I’m not seeing that bug in OmniWeb 6, and you won’t need to pay anything to update to it since OmniWeb 6 is free.
I’m sorry we didn’t point you at a better solution years ago! Rather than trashing your entire plist, you can use Terminal’s defaults remove command to remove specific settings from your plist while leaving the other settings untouched. It wouldn’t be hard to write a script which would remove everything from your plist except for the autofill data that you want to preserve. (But ideally we would have used such a script to narrow down exactly which setting was triggering the problem in OmniWeb 5 in the first place, so we could have tracked it down and fixed it sooner than OmniWeb 6.)
If you would still find a script like that to be helpful, let me know. (Current builds of OmniWeb 6 require Yosemite, and you noted that you’re on Mavericks.)
Thanks for the response! I just printed a Washington Post article from OW6, and I won’t say I got the pagination bug in the exact form I’ve gotten it in the past, but there were no headers and footers (web address, Page X of Y, etc.) on the hard copy at all. Is there some preference in OW6 to say that I want this stuff? If the headers should be there by default, then we have a problem.
I couldn’t find a .plist for OW6, only for OW5, and its timestamp was on the old side. I might be interested in a script, but let’s take it one step at a time for now.
May I assume that the release version will run under Mavericks? Thanks again.
Visual tabs.
Site specific preferences.
Ease of adding new search engines/sites.
“Breadcrumb” browsing.
Functional download window as opposed to Chromium, Safari, Firefox, etc…
What I consider to be “proper” cookie handling (optionally discard when quitting).
Little touches like being able to go forward or backward through the preferences rather than back & forth to the main prefs window.
It’s the little things throughout OmniWeb that make it an exceptional browser.
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).
Many thanks to the “powers that be” for the recent updates and showing my (still) favorite browser some love. There are still things about OmniWeb that just aren’t available elsewhere.
[quote]Version 6.0 test
Sunday, June 18, 2017
Tab Sidebar — Drawers are deprecated in High Sierra (and were causing some misbehaviors like sending the parent window to the back every time you opened a drawer), so this seems like a good time to make a long-overdue change: tabs now live in a sidebar rather than a drawer.
High Sierra compatibility — Tab thumbnails generally draw correctly now on High Sierra (instead of showing empty or clipped content).
Tab Drops — You can once again drop tabs directly onto the main area of a browser window to move or copy those tabs to that window.
Tuesday, June 14, 2017
High Sierra compatibility — Fixed some crashes encountered on beta builds of High Sierra when displaying the completions for an address and when opening the print dialog on a Mac with a Touch Bar.[/quote]
@supporthumans: Receiving the update notice this morning, I clicked to update to R292308 and then get the following message:
OmniWeb cannot be opened because of a problem.
Check with the developer to make sure OmniWeb works with this version of OS X. You may need to reinstall the application. Be sure to install any available updates for the application and OS X.
Click Report to see more detailed information and send a report to Apple.
I’ve tried back to R292159 with the same results. I’m guessing that something on my end got corrupted? Is there something I should clear out or delete?
Some more information:
Application Specific Information:
dyld: launch, loading dependent libraries
Dyld Error Message:
Symbol not found: OBJC_CLASS$_NSNotificationCenter
Referenced from: /Applications/OmniWeb.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniWeb
Expected in: /System/Library/Frameworks/AddressBook.framework/Versions/A/AddressBook
in /Applications/OmniWeb.app/Contents/MacOS/OmniWeb
Fixed (hopefully!) in the upcoming r292311 build, where I’ve added this release note:
fixed - El Capitan and Sierra compatibility — Recent test builds of OmniWeb (after r291920) were failing to launch on 10.11 El Capitan and 10.12 Sierra due to a linker bug in Xcode 9 beta 3. Worked around the bug so OmniWeb should work once again on shipping versions of the operating system. (That said, there are some really great changes coming in 10.13 High Sierra that will finally make it possible for OmniWeb to migrate from WebKit 1 to WebKit 2, so at some point these builds are going to drop support for earlier versions of the OS. But that day isn’t today.)
Please give some notice of the last build to support El Capitan. My Mac Mini won’t support Sierra, so that is as far as I can go, but I would like to be able to get the last build possible for it. Even better would be to have downloads available for the last build available for any given OSX version. Whether due to hardware or needing legacy software, there are those of us who cannot upgrade to the latest and greatest OS.
Despite not being actively supported, OmniWeb is still my main browser as it just has functionality that none of the other browsers give me.
I’d like to stress that I’d be willing to spend some money on it. Maybe we can think of a different model? Something like a donation system? Once people have donated enough to finance some serious work on it, Omni goes ahead. On can even bind donations to feature requests.
At the moment, I feel like I’ve lost hours of productivity simply because I’m using inferior browsers that don’t work as well as OW did.
I’d like to see how many people really want to pitch in to pay.
I know Ken has a lot of other, more important, projects on his plate, but if the committed interest is there (e.g. payments made/charged), I’m hoping he can justify the time to work on advancing OW.
I was excited this morning to see a OW 6 test build posted on MacUpdate, but unfortunately it’s still the build from September 2018 that isn’t working correctly on Mojave.
Once again, I’d like to reiterate my willingness to pay for OW. I’m far less productive in other browsers.
