Windows Vista's IE 7 Imitates OmniWeb

[Scott Maier]

You can watch the keynote here:

<http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx>

But it is quite painful :-)  Aside from being quite boring and  
awkward at times, it is also frustrating to see them fawning over a  
lot of stuff that has been around in some form on Mac OS X for years.

The Windows Media Player sneak peek did look kind of interesting  
though, as it will contain a few features for library browsing that I  
wish were in iTunes.

In any case, there is a brief demo if IE7 as well, and the thumbnail  
mode for tabs replaces the page you are currently viewing with a icon- 
view-like page of thumbnails.  It's not a _bad_ thing, but not as  
good as being able to always have them on screen, IMO.  Something  
similar to the page of thumbnails and/or something a little more  
Expose-like has been discussed for OmniWeb before, but we're still  
not at the add-new-features point just yet.

We'll have an update on OmniWeb 5.5 soon.

Oh, and iRider is the name of the first browser I ever saw with tab  
thumbnails.  It's based on the IE engine in Windows.
<http://www.irider.com/>


  - Scott


On Jan 5, 2006, at 1:04 PM, Derek Currie wrote:

> This is kind of fun, so I thought I would share it.
>
> The great David Pogue posted a Circuits email article this  
> afternoon from CES, where he will be doing reporting all week. In  
> today's email (which you can access at <http://www.nytimes.com/ 
> circuitsemail>) he discusses the Bill Gates & cohorts keynote from  
> last night. Several aspects of Vista that were directly "stolen  
> from Apple" are pointed out. It is all quite amusing.
>
> But at one point Mr. Pogue made an apparent error. He had begun a  
> section in the article discussing ideas in Vista that actually  
> appeared to be original. Sadly, in one case he was apparently  
> mistaken. Here is the relevant paragraph:
>
>> * Thumbnail tabbed browsing. Internet Explorer will finally get  
>> tabbed browsing (a feature that Firefox, Safari and other browsers  
>> have had for years), in which you can keep multiple Web pages open  
>> at once, all in the same window; you switch from one to the next  
>> by clicking little file-folder tabs at the top. But in the Vista  
>> browser, you can also view all your tabbed Web pages as window  
>> miniatures, so that you can jump to one according to what it looks  
>> like (rather than just its name). A great idea.
>
> Window miniatures is a great idea isn't it!
>
> And it originated in OmniWeb years ago.
>
> I sent Mr. Pogue a note about this fact and offered to send him  
> screen shots if they would be helpful. Of course I have not yet  
> seen the Vista implementation of window miniatures, but so far I am  
> not hearing anything I can't already do in OmniWeb.
>
> Share and Enjoy!
>
> :-Derek
>