Fed up with waiting for OmniWeb 5.5, I googled for it…and discovered that it’s been sneakily sitting in public beta for a while now! It’s found in a secret location inside a passworded disk image.
The page contains instructions on how to obtain that password. (Just join up to the OmniWeb forums.)
My impressions: damn, it’s fast. Feels like a real browser again. I’ve only got a tardy 867MHz Powerbook, and it was becoming a bit of a chore to actually browse with OmniWeb. (Which was my reason for eventually leaving it temporarily a while ago.) Now no longer. Opening new tabs, switching between tabs, and switching between workspaces (that is, all the UI stuff) is actually snappy.
Since this release has been all about updating to WebKit, the new features list is a little thin. It’s still not possible to subscribe to syndicate feeds in other applications; to be frank, OmniWeb’s behaviour here is obnoxious and this really needs to be fixed. Everything else is so good, it’s a pity it falls down so much here.
I’m looking forward greatly to see how the betas progress. I haven’t been using it long, but certainly no trouble so far…