OmniWeb bugs / issues

[Erik Kay]

First off, I wanted to say that I think that this is a very cool app.   
Congrats for doing a great job so far!

However, I have found a number of problems that would be nice to see  
addressed... (in no particular order)

* I know you guys have a browser, so this isn't as much of an issue as it  
otherwise might be, but this history buffer can get pretty crowded when you  
run into "go back to home page" links.  These seem to be pretty common, and  
lead to circular paths in the history buffer.  It might be cool if when you  
hit one of these links if the history buffer actually shrunk back  
accordingly.  However, I could see wanting this to be either way.  Maybe it  
could be a preference

* if you paste in a URL, it seems to care about leading spaces.  It should  
ignore leading spaces. 


* paste in a URL, it will add an entry into the browser that says (URL-1).   
If you click on URL-1, it goes back to the default home page (strange thing  
#1), then if you click on it again, it goes back to the page it should have  
gone to (except without any of its links shown in the right browser).  Then  
if you click on it again, it dumps core (no console error). 


* emacs key bindings in the URL line?

* paste in a URL with a leading space (it tells you that it can't find it).   
Remove the leading space and hit return again.  Rather than just having the  
(URL-1) entry like normal, it has two entries (URL-1) and (URL-2).  


* go to this link: http://www.mit.edu:8001. (SIPB WWW Server)  The image is  
lined up differently than Mosaic does.  Which is right?

* at this link, once when I clicked on the "usage" link, it crashed on me  
right away.  No console messages.  However, I haven't been able to reproduce  
this. 


* your fixed width font should default to being 10 point instead of 12 point.  
 If you look at the "usage" link mentioned above, the fixed width font looks  
kind of bad. 


* go to this home page: €http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/rei/home.html.  There  
appear to be all kinds of problems here.  Specifically, it appears that you  
treat all filenames with extensions differently than those without.  This  
page has a bunch of images with weird extensions.  For example, there's a  
file that is something.GIF.  Rather than imaging it in place, it brings up an  
open panel and has ImageViewer (sorry, not using the Omni image filters) open  
it in the app rather than filtering it.  Similarly, it has a file called  
something.Z.  This file isn't a compressed file, it's an xbm file.  It's  
labeled as an image in the source to the page, so why aren't you trying to  
filter it?  Instead an open panel comes up and it tries to open it in Opener.  
 Ick.  I know that in NEXTSTEP we have a pretty clean idea that file  
extensions mean something, but I don't think you can afford to make taht  
assumption here.  Finally, there's an xbm file that acts very strangely.   
It's the third one from the top (next to "Here is some of my online art  
(mostly bitmap)").  Click on that, and it will display the ascii text of the  
xbm image rather than trying to display it as an image. 


* your tabstops appear to be much smaller than under Mosaic.  Given that  
people will be formatting their text etc with Mosaic in mind, it makes sense  
to try to use the same size tab stops. 


* I'll try to phrase this as gently as possibly, but your dividing lines look  
really ugly. :-)  Just put in a simple line.  Really.  I think simplicity  
would look better here.  Or at least anti-alias this image. 


*€go to WHat's New with NCSA "Whats New for February 1994" and try the chess  
art gallery.  It seems to be off in la-la land.  The globe is spinning, the  
cursor is a spinning disk and the status line says "Data transfer complete".   
This is right after it made an ftp connection.  900 seconds later it says  
something like"timeout... unable to access control document". and then  
"unable to access document'.  Then the document goes away, and it goes back  
up a page.  This is unfortunate, since most of the document was downloaded  
successfully.  Then, even more unfortunately, it crashes with this message on  
the console:
Mar  3 18:19:56 sonic OmniWeb[462]: objc: FREED(id): message perform:with:  
sent to freed object=0x175998

* when you go to a page, as it fills in the page the scrollbar seems to  
bounce up and down a constantly rather than just shrinking.  This looks  
really weird. I'm sure that the contents are actually growing and shrinking  
because of the way you guys deal with images, but I still think it looks bad. 


* I'd appreciate it if there were a preference to turn off the display as it  
loads stuff.  I'm sure that you guys spent a decent amount of time making it  
do this gracefully, but I would rather have it lock at the previous page  
until the entire page (including the images) is loaded and ready to go.   I  
just think that the filling things in looks ugly, and I often get the  
impression that it's finished loading a page when it really hasn't. 


* as you load stuff, it would be nice if there were some sort of completion  
bar somewhere showing how much more it had to go before it had finished  
loading the page.  I don't know if this would be possible in all cases (if  
you can't find out how big something's going to be before you download it, it  
would be pretty tough. :-), but it would be nice when possible to have a clue  
how much more you had left. 


* transparent GIFs look weird.  Look at mtv.com's bullet items on its own page. 

*€ftp connections are really slow.  It appears to be re-logging in each time  
you change directories (ick!).  Couldn't we stay logged on until we move out  
of the directory? This is really bad on a really busy ftp server (like  
wuarchive). 


* a find panel would be really nice. 


* when it's not a hyper link, double and triple clicking should do the right  
thing (i.e. select a word, select a paragraph for copying and pasting)

* it's trying to automatically open the file when downloaded.  ick!  I don't  
want it automatically opening the file.  At most it should open the  
directory.  Maybe this could be a preference. 


* go to SCO's home page (http://www.sco.com/index.html).  Clicking on the  
"superhighway signs" doesn't work. 


* go to GNN's home page (http://nearnet.gnn.com/). In Mosaic, the pictures of  
the balloon actually kind of connect together, in OmniWeb, they're spaced  
really far apart. I know you can say that "well, this isn't Mosaic".   
However, remember, that people will be designing their layouts with Mosaic in  
mind.  If the layout shown in OminWeb doesn't come really close to matching  
theirs, a lot of stuff won't look great. 


* the timeout should be a preference.  I find it a bit too long for my tastes.


anyway, I hope those suggestions / bug reports help.  Keep on truckin!

later,
Erik