browser ponderings
Aug. 27th, 2006 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashEvery now and then I survey the web browsers. These days I use Safari; its Maciness prevails over its general lack of extensibility.
I checked out Opera and Omniweb. Both are, in theory, Speedier. In practice, they end up feeling much clunkier and awkward to me. One of the major reasons in both is a chunk of prettiness: tab thumbnails. Opera pops up a thumbnail when you hover over a tab. Clever, right? Except it's not smart enough to realize that you probably don't need to see a thumbnail of the page you're viewing - so I click on the tab with the trackpad, then leave the pointer there and navigate with the keyboard. Then I have to flip the pointer somewhere else after a beat to get rid of the stupid thumbnail.
Omniweb is even worse. It doesn't have a tab bar. It has a tab drawer. While this means more space to show them, it also eats up tons of screen space on a laptop. It also lets you choose which side the tab drawer opens on, and will "helpfully" reposition the window to make space for the drawer. Even if there's ample room for the tab drawer to open on the other side. Where's the 'use normal drawer behavior' choice? Go figure. It was cool to implement, that's what matters. Even if I keep on clicking on the open tab drawer when I think I'm clicking on a window half-hidden by Omniweb.
One thing they both do that I'll miss when I go back to Safari is natively support site-specific stylesheets and prefs. I use PithHelmet to do this, but it's a bit kludgy. OmniWeb does this far better, with a button in the browser toolbar whose image is the OSX preferences app's icon, with the Apple logo replaced by the site's favicon. Hitting it lets you very easily set preferences for this site: custom stylesheets, change the font size for good, manipulate the ad-blocking... very very slick.
But god, that tab drawer just takes up so damn much screen space, and it keeps popping out, and there's no option for having a tab bar, rather than a list of names or thumbnails.
I guess I should see where Camino is, these days. While I'm at it maybe I should get one of the nighties of Safari and check out its take on webdev tools...
I might consider switching to Omniweb, if not for how annoying I find its handling of tabs. I don't think I'd switch to Opera; its unMaciness really gets to me in the same ways Firefox does.
I checked out Opera and Omniweb. Both are, in theory, Speedier. In practice, they end up feeling much clunkier and awkward to me. One of the major reasons in both is a chunk of prettiness: tab thumbnails. Opera pops up a thumbnail when you hover over a tab. Clever, right? Except it's not smart enough to realize that you probably don't need to see a thumbnail of the page you're viewing - so I click on the tab with the trackpad, then leave the pointer there and navigate with the keyboard. Then I have to flip the pointer somewhere else after a beat to get rid of the stupid thumbnail.
Omniweb is even worse. It doesn't have a tab bar. It has a tab drawer. While this means more space to show them, it also eats up tons of screen space on a laptop. It also lets you choose which side the tab drawer opens on, and will "helpfully" reposition the window to make space for the drawer. Even if there's ample room for the tab drawer to open on the other side. Where's the 'use normal drawer behavior' choice? Go figure. It was cool to implement, that's what matters. Even if I keep on clicking on the open tab drawer when I think I'm clicking on a window half-hidden by Omniweb.
One thing they both do that I'll miss when I go back to Safari is natively support site-specific stylesheets and prefs. I use PithHelmet to do this, but it's a bit kludgy. OmniWeb does this far better, with a button in the browser toolbar whose image is the OSX preferences app's icon, with the Apple logo replaced by the site's favicon. Hitting it lets you very easily set preferences for this site: custom stylesheets, change the font size for good, manipulate the ad-blocking... very very slick.
But god, that tab drawer just takes up so damn much screen space, and it keeps popping out, and there's no option for having a tab bar, rather than a list of names or thumbnails.
I guess I should see where Camino is, these days. While I'm at it maybe I should get one of the nighties of Safari and check out its take on webdev tools...
I might consider switching to Omniweb, if not for how annoying I find its handling of tabs. I don't think I'd switch to Opera; its unMaciness really gets to me in the same ways Firefox does.
no subject
Date: 2006-08-29 02:14 pm (UTC)