OmniWeb 5.5

I know what you’re thinking: a web browser that costs? Costs money? In 2006? And has the same technology under the hood as Safari? Huh? Buh? Juh? Zuh?

Really. OmniWeb 5.5 is superb. I’ve already banished Safari from my dock. That good.

See, I can only use Safari after a lot of pimping. My Safari needs the extra powers imbued by Saft, the enhanced searching afforded by Inquisitor and the ad-blocking fierceness of PithHelmet before I’ll tolerate it. Even then I’m not 100% satisfied with the feature set.

All those enhancements to Safari come at a cost. Saft and PithHelmet are SIMBL plugins. This essentially means that they jam some code into Safari every time it runs, overriding this and that behavior as they see fit. This tends to make Safari wonky: slow(er than it should be), unpredictable, and leaky.

OmniWeb 5.5 is my pimped-out Safari and then some. It does everything I would have relied on an unstable SIMBL plugin for, and does it all while staying fast and pretty and doing more for me. It took all of ten minutes to get cozy to the tab drawer and those slick thumbnails. There are all kinds of informative tools to inspect web sites with. It generally seems to take advantage of the power of OS X more than Safari does. A+++ would browse with again.

Where’s Shiira and Firefox 2 in all this? Shiira ain’t ready for daily use yet, simple as that. Firefox 2.0b2 has become my development browser, mostly for Firebug. But I treat the browser like I’d treat an office: I get my work done there and then I leave, promptly. Firefox still doesn’t feel at home on the Mac. Camino fixes that, but excises the ability to use all those handy extensions in the process, tossing it out of the running.

In summary: give OmniWeb 5.5 a shot. It’s tops!