Browsing on OSX: Opera or OmniWeb?
I’ve talked about how Opera 9 has become my browser of choice on Windows and Linux, but I used OmniWeb on OSX. As time has gone on, there were things that I missed on Opera when I was home using OmniWeb. But there were things I liked about OmniWeb. So I thought and made a list:
What I like about Opera over OmniWeb
- It’s free (vs $30)
- Keyboard shortcuts, especially x and z to move between history.See more here.
- User JavaScripts, very similiar to greasemonkey.
- Available on all platforms I use.
- More stable — every once in a while, OmniWeb will crash on me. One time it crashed as soon as I started it. I was able to clean the cache and get it working again.
What I like about OmniWeb over Opera
- Better integration into OSX,like with spelling, dictionary, Keychain, etc.
- Can use Emacs keys in text controls, etc.
- Click a button in a text area and you can have a larger editor window. You can even import a file from this window.
- Per site configuration.
- It’s pallette of sites instead of tabs. Especially that I could drag a site onto the pallette and it will load there.
This is a tough list but the biggies are cost and cross-platform. Yes, I’ve come to the decision that I like everything to work the same way on all platforms. Since OmniWeb is only available on Mac, that gives it a big minus. The rest of OmniWeb’s features are great, and if I worked on a Mac all day, everyday, it would be my browser of choice. But it’s not – I use Windows for my day job. So the choice is surprisingly easy.
So now Opera is my default browser on OSX.