Improving OmniWeb

[Arno Hautala]

> - - General
>      - Newer WebCore
>            This is obvious, and OmniWeb know it's serious, and they 
> work
>            with it. I mention it on the top to indicate that this will
>            always be the most important feature request.

True, but I think they do a pretty good job with this.

>      - Sidebar
>            Opera and Firefox have it. And Safari with Saft. Personally 
> I
>            do not miss it that much, but some users might do.

What goes in there exactly?  Bookmarks?  History?  I think the OW 
method is fine for both of these.  I could see it being of use as an 
alternate way to see these items, but I think OG tried this with the 
slide-out pane in pre 5.x.

>      - Inline search
>            OmniWeb have support for inline link search, but I have not
>            found a way to do a general inline search. What about doing
>            an inline general search when holding down alt button, and
>            link search when not, and a preference option to switch the
>            two. Opera support this native, and there are at least three
>            different plugins to Safari that add this feature.

I'd like to see find in the way FireFox does it, with a bar at the 
bottom.  It can be awkward, but is really nice how it live searches.  
Then again, I think you can turn on live searching with a plist 
addition.  It won't give you a bar or anything, but you'll see words 
highlighted as they are found and you can go forward and backwards with 
the keyboard.  What OW really needs in this respect is a better manual 
that documents _everything_.

>      - Do not refresh front tab
>            Should be an option to not refresh the tab in the front, 
> even
>            if the page has a META-ENV refresh tag attached to it which
>            most newspapers have. It is annoing when the page refreshes
>            when you are in the middle of the page. The Saft plugin to
>            safari has this feature.

I hate it when this happens.  I'd love a way to turn off meta refresh 
in _every_ instance.  This behavior only where the refresh will lead to 
the same page would be a nice feature as well.

> - - Crash reporter
>      - Should send the mail automatically
>            Without starting up Mail.app.

I think this would require including a mail server (you can't assume 
the user has a mail server installed and turned on) or issuing HTTP 
POST commands (if OW has crashed, you can't rely on being able to send 
HTTP commands).

> - - Tabs
>      - The little "X" button you click to close a tab is a bit too 
> small.
>            Reported by John Gruber. My suggestion is to add support for
>            deleting a tab by holding in example Alt+Shift down when
>            clicking on a tab. Opera 7 support this behaviour by
>            shift-clicking.

That'd be nice.  I'd like to see the "X" _not_ disappear when only one 
tab is there.  We hashed this out when developing Adium and the 
consensus was that it was better to have multiple ways to close the 
window than it was to have a widget disappear.  OW could even take the 
FireFox route where clicking the "X" when only one tab is left just 
loads an empty page.

>      - Shrink and stretch the height of tabs.
>            Depending of the height of the window and the number of 
> tabs.
>            John Gruber has mentioned this earlier:
>            daringfireball.netÑomniweb_5_public_beta
>            <http://daringfireball.net/2004/02/omniweb_5_public_beta>

You can always use tabs without a preview.  I think auto-sizing like 
the dock would be interesting.  The width could stay the same, with the 
size of the preview shrinking until it is only as high as the tab 
minimum.  Nice.

> - - Site Preferences and ad block
>      - Should be possible to disable plugins
>            The way you can disable javascript. Currently you cannot
>            disable windows media player or shockwave plugins for a
>            specific site, without disabling it globally. PithHelmet has
>            this.

Mmm, that'd be nice.

>      - Individual block list
>            Should be a block list for each site preferences 
> individually
>            in addition to the global one.

I thought you could do this.  You can always use the allow list to 
mimic this.

>      - Synchronization
>            Synchronization of bookmarks via WEBDAV is a brilliant
>            feature. I would like if OmniWeb moved the Site Preference
>            section away from the com.omnigroup.OmniWeb5.plist file, and
>            into a separate plist file which optionally can be stored
>            over WEBDAV. Maybe saving workspaces info to WEBDAV could be
>            done in the same batch :D
>      - Improved "Filter Image"
>            When Ctrl+clicking on an image you can add the url of the
>            image to the block list with the option "Filter Image".
>            Instead this should popup a dialog a input field entering 
> the
>            url, and regex-ed url preselected. This way the user can
>            change parts of the url to .* to match more generally. Look
>            at the AdBlock extention to firefox.

It'd be a nice addition.  Currently you have to open the prefs to edit 
the string, where you _can_ use regexp.  I do wish that you could 
_remove_ elements and not just not load them.  The way FireFox and Pith 
allow you too remove iFrames or remove an image and have the page 
change shape.  I think it's come up before that OW shouldn't change the 
page layout.  I believe that if the user wants to change the layout, 
they should be allowed.  It could always be adjusted on a site by site 
pref.

>      - Block elements from "Page Info"
>            I use the page info feature a lot to get a  overview of what
>            elements exist on a page. But there is no way to see the URL
>            of each element which is crucial to ad blocking. The Page
>            Info section contains buttons: "Display", "View Source" and
>            "Save as...". There should be a button like "Filter element"
>            or "block element" to add the url of the element to the 
> block
>            list. This should result in a popup box with the URL the way
>            I described on the section - Improved "Filter Image".

> - - Bookmarks
>      - Check all bookmarks for dead links
>            A menu command manually executed to go through all bookmarks
>            to check whether they are dead or not, and setting status to
>            "Unreachable" for dead bookmarks. It is important that this
>            command do not set "Unviewed content" status.

Mmm

>      - Status for RSS bookmarks/feeds
>            It is a problem that each RSS entry which is new get status
>            "Unviewed content". I want to subscribe to a lot of RSS
>            feeds, and only scroll through them to see if there is
>            something interesting. This way at average I got a couple of
>            hundred RSS entries with status "Unviewed content". This
>            result in a situation where all my regular sites that I 
> watch
>            for changes drowns. My suggestion on how to approach this
>            problem is to add another status type for bookmarks like
>            "Unviewed RSS entry" or similar with a separate entry, and a
>            separate smart-folder in bookmarks view to show them all.

Or a separate count for RSS.

--                                                 --
arno  s.  hautala        /-\        arno at alum.wpi.edu
--                                                 --