The OmniWeb Beta is out today and I’ve been messing with it a bit…
Since it is built on WebKit, the same technology as Safari many feature and even key commands will be very familiar to Safari users. I like the addition of tabs within the sidebar, especially with the addition of a visual thumbnail, though managing tabs in the traditional sense never proved challenging or even hard to deal with. This new feature may even add some weight to the application which is not necessary other than to show off.
Bookmarks import flawlessly and your passwords for sites are also immediately auto-filled if you had previously saved them in the Keychain. This is a wonderful bit of consistency and something I wish more browsers and applications made use of. If you like to test or switch between things it is often a pain to deal with password management.
While it looks nice, this is a hard sell and yes it is being sold. Safari 1.2 is supposedly right around the corner with fixes and a possible feature of two up its sleeve and will be free. While OmniWeb will at least work with all the same sites (though also probably carry the same issues) you’ll have to pay for features like ad blocking (something I am not testing).
All in all a nice piece of work, but I’ll be sticking it out with Safari for now.