[OmniWeb][omniweb] is a web browser for Macs with a particularly nice innovation called a _thumbnail tab_. Lots of web browser have tabs but this ain’t no text tab.
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As you can see from the screenshot, the tabs on the right side are actually thumbnails of the web page! In the top tab, I am using salesforce.com, in the next tab, I am reading a script for Deadwood, and so on.
Thumbnail tabs are awesome because:
1. You can find the right tab very quickly, with a just a glance. It is much harder to recognize the tab you want in tabbed browsers that mark tabs with the page title and a favicon. A picture is worth a thousand words.
2. You can put the tabs on the side of the browser. Other tabbed browsers put the tabs at the top of the browser. Putting tabs on the side lets you maximize vertical screen estate for actual web surfing. Monitors are wide, not tall, so you want to maximize the available vertical estate since web pages are tall, not wide.
Since OmniWeb runs on a Mac, you can drag the tab drawer to the right or left to make it wider or narrower. The thumbnails get bigger or smaller on the fly as you drag the tab drawer. Awesome. This lets you fit less or more thumbnail tabs into the tab drawer.
OmniWeb has a few other great [features][omniweb] like saved workspaces, saved sessions, and per-site preferences.
With the release of Firefox, its plugin architecture, and plugins like Greasemonkey, Piggy Bank, and so on, the web browser is changing very quickly right now. OmniWeb and Apple’s [Safari][safari] are not the browser for you if you want to use these cutting edge applications. In fact, OmniWeb can’t really enhance the web browser much since it is based on [WebCore][webcore], the same core technology in Safari.
Bug fixes and innovation are much more rapid in Firefox. Firefox now has a [method to create thumbnails][firefoxthumb]. This new feature can be scripted so creative developers are going to find new and interesting uses for thumbnails. Anywhere you see a URL or a link to web page is a potential application for a thumbnail.
That is a lot of thumbnails buddy.
[safari]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/safari/
[firefoxthumb]: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2005/05/rendering_web_p.html
[omniweb]: http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/
[webcore]: http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webcore/
[safari]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/safari/
iRider’s PageList feature is even better, too bad we don’t have anything like this for OS X. I will give OnmiWeb a try myself.
Thumbnails are a great idea — I hope it comes to Firefox soon.
I watched the demo video for iRider… Some of its features are very impressive — the thumbnails are just the beginning. Copying a list of pages into a text list of URLs and vice versa is slick, too. Too bad a $29 browser will never take off. I’m not an extension developer (now, anyway), but I wonder how much of that functionality could be adapted for FF? The little progress bars on the thumbnails might be difficult. The makers of iRider might have some copyrights on their innovations, too, for what that’s worth.
I think thumbnail tabs are a waste of screen real estate. They are like icons on your desktop – you can quickly find the ones that are distinctive, but only the filename can help you find a particular word document out of a batch. Tiny webpage pictures can differentiate between nytimes.com and msn.com, but probably won’t help you tell one forum post from another or compare a bunch of products on amazon. Which sucks, because I find tabs are most useful for this latter task. Cmd-clicking on a zillion ebay entries sure saves a lot of back-button time.
It would be much better to stick with regular tabs, but put favicons in them.
firefox likes your thinking. check number 2 in the features list for 1.1:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/deerpark/new-browser-features.html
Of course, it looks pretty limited at first.
i think I’m going to try out deerpark. my firefox has been hanging when i have many windows open.
Thats great about firefox supporting this soon! I was just thinking a few days ago about an extension like this (but haven’t found one yet).