waffle

Power browsing on Mac OS X is dead. There, I said it.

What’s power browsing? Yes, it’s a crappy term, it sounds like Extreme Ironing, but it’s the shortest I could think of. It’s browsing with a browser that’s capable of more than your average browser and using those features. URL autocompletion, popup blocking, tabs and form autofill are all power browsing alumni and have trickled into most browsers, maybe save Lynx or That Horrible Spectre On Your Cell Phone That Will Crap Out After 64K Of Data.

OmniWeb, my system default, has these power browsing features: thumbnail tabs (a picture of the website in every tab is affixed to the tab), site preferences (a bunch of ground rules can be customized per domain, including type size, style sheet, javascript options and browser name as reported to the server), search shortcuts (”g foo” does a Google search for “foo”, “wiki Bar” goes to the Wikipedia page for Bar), source code editing and redisplaying, and workspaces (constantly keeps track of what windows or tabs you have open and allows you to freeze-dry the state at any point, including caching the pages, and switch to another state, or keep one state persistent across multiple launches).

Good, right? Yeah. These features were every bit as awesome when they were first announced slightly less than three years ago in beta form at the MacWorld San Francisco expo. Other browsers are catching up with many of the features (search shortcuts were not terribly original back then either, and state persistence and thumbnail tabs are getting there). These features do not rot or decay as such, that’s not what I’m saying, but there’s an awful lot that has happened in the past three years. Greasemonkey. Tab Exposé. And the Omni Group has spent a lot of time simply going from a bastardized version of WebCore (the real deep framework behind web browsing in Mac OS X) to a bastardized version of WebKit (the more shallow framework behind web browsing in Mac OS X). They were two blocks ahead, they ran to stand still, and now they are about one block ahead and not actually moving a whole lot forward.

So. Let’s for a minute assume that the Omni Group is not working its ass off doing OmniWeb 6.0 which is totally awesome and has options for blocking any web site mentioning Yo Momma jokes, freedom fries and obscure Megatokyo references. What are our options for power browsing on Mac OS X?

• Shiira. A commendable open source effort, primarily maintained by japanese programmers, with the goal of doing a better Safari. Has shown promise in implementing new technologies, like transitions when tabs are switched, or Tab Exposé. Alas, the development pace seems fairly glacial, and they don’t seem interested in offering up a technical platform to play with in the UI.

• Camino. The Mozilla Foundation’s Cocoa browser using the Gecko rendering engine from Firefox. Started by Dave Hyatt, now rendering guru on the Safari/WebKit team. Interesting, but shares many Shiira characteristics - “be like Safari”, generally slow development - without almost any new experimental features.

• Firefox. The same Firefox that we see working well on Windows and Linux isn’t as good as it can be on Mac OS X. A lot of the UI looks like Flash mockups, and it is fairly slow. Has a lot of extensions - plentiful and written in JavaScript - going for it, though.

• Opera. Reasonably fast, un-Mac-like UI. A polarizing browser that, to its favor in this discussion, does take the kitchen sink-approach, but not in the way of including actual developer tools - more like including as much other Internet-related stuff that you might use if your browser is open, like BitTorrent downloading, IRC chat and email.

• Pimp My Safari / Camino. Jon Hicks, the most browser-promiscuous man currently known to science, not only designed the Firefox logo, but also maintains two sites listing more or less (usually less) supported plugins to either of Safari or Camino. A lot of functionality can be added, but not everything, and there’s little actual innovation involved in breaking totally new ground. Additionally, since they hook in through unsupported orifices, they are usually broken with every other Safari release.

(I have left out pure developer browsers (like Xyle scope) and browsers embedded within other apps (like NetNewsWire), because they are either worse to actually browse in than any other normal browser or are much more unlikely to add “power” features.)

I am sad to come to the conclusion that there’s not much left to grab a hold of in this debate. I see The Omni Group or possibly Apple as the two groups that can still invigorate this debate - Omni by giving OmniWeb a major trouser hike, and Apple by announcing some sort of “Pro” Safari.

There is another option, though, and that’s one of the community creating its own damn Power Browser. (With Blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the browser! And the blackjack.) If you’re interested, post in the comments or contact me.