I upgraded my web browser to the OmniWeb 4.1 Public Beta yesterday. I just used it for my morning blog read and it worked really well. My thoughts:
- Tables do seem to load faster. This was a big beef I had from the old version.
- CSS support is much better. I think I finally saw Beau‘s site as intended!
- I love the little drop downs on the forward and back buttons that give you an abbreviated history. Absolutely necessary for the way I surf.
- Okay, this is the one negative. When I hit certain sites (like Chris‘s and Max‘s), the Download Manager would get tripped and download some bogus “index.html” document to my desktop, and the original page would never appear in my browser. At first I thought it was happening on sites where the default document isn’t “index.html”, but Max’s site disproved that. I have a similar problem using IE 5.1 too, where certain sites (like web-goddess) cause the browser to think it’s downloading a gzipped file. Has anyone else had a problem like this? What the heck is going on?
Anyway, the positives greatly outweigh the negatives. If you use OmniWeb, I suggest upgrading.
2 responses
Not being a Mac user I can’t offer any specific advice, but could it be something to do with the MIME-Type supplied by the web server and then interpreted by the browser?
I’m not sure how OmniWeb (or IE for the Mac) work, but I know that in most Windows browsers there’s an option to define how the browser deals with conflicts between the MIME-Type supplied by the web server and the application associated with the file extension. Perhaps there’s a mismatch between the MIME-Type sent by the web server and the file extension OmniWeb sees, and it’s allowing the MIME setting to override the file association. Alternatively, it may be that OmniWeb is reacting to a MIME-Type it doesn’t recognise by just saving the file to disk. (I’ve done a quick Google Groups search and it appears that when OmniWeb sees a MIME Type it doesn’t understand it tends to try to save the file to disk. Whether IE does the same I couldn’t say, but it seems likely.)
Unfortunately I don’t use a Mac so I can’t tell you where MacOS/OmniWeb stores the MIME-Types and/or their associated applications, but perhaps this will give you a starting point in figuring out what’s going on.
I’ve been toying with other browsers for Windows that use the IE engine but cut out the bloat.
I’ve plumped for a freeware one called Crazy Browser (www.crazybrowser.com). It’s nice. Others to try are myIE (freeware) and a Netcaptor (shareware).
Go check em out and browse the internet in sleek ‘n’ sexy mode! Though I’m sure Kris does that anyway when any URL hit her screen
Go Girl Go!