eds.activemath.org

Sorry, this time it really is unrelated… but I just wanted to celebrate the joy of OmniWeb again and again.

OmniWeb is a commercial browser, not very expensive, one with customer support and a polish that you never get anywhere else for many aspects! It has secret features for web-developers and this fluidity that pushes you to abuse it…

If you look at the product pages, it looks like a normal browser, it is indeed Safari-core based, except it has these graphical tabs.

But it has a few other features which make it really unique:

• the location bar auto-completion is unbeatable, it allows you to put several words and will match all of them. So I can easily type “i2geo ontolo” to find, right away http://i2geo.net/bin/Blog/CrossCurriculumOntology, without even going there! All other such bars do only prefix matching which is unusable in many situations (e.g. you have to type the whole domain name before specifying a part of the domain while the domain typically is made of pretty universal parts, such as .com or myuniversity.de)

• the “error console” is actually a web-channel monitor. Some buggy CGI scripts can only be debugged this way! Finding whether a cookie is ignored because it is set for a different domain is also only possible with that (firebug comes close but not yet almost at it, e.g you can’t search in firebug’s log)

• you can change HTML pages live, that’s amazing… get a web-site that’s just too badly designed to work with your browser? Be angry and start using another browser, or just disable that broken javascript by hand-editing then continuing, say, your bank process (all cookies and caches kept of course). Only Opera comes close.

• in terms of memory requirement, it could be better, but hey, I last paid for it about 3 years ago… so maybe it needs a deep revision. Camino is somewhat better in this respect. And sometimes it really crashes. But that’s not even bad… since a rewake up will reload as much as possible, will keep the history of each tab, and will, of course, keep all the contents of the forms you were just in the middle of editing. E.g. editing a blog entry such as this one could be done long distilled in five weeks….

Have a go, it really is an enjoyment.

Oh, and did I mention? it’s only for Macs.