I saw a few negative reviews here and thought I should counter with a positive one.

For people who spend a lot of time each day in their Web browsers, this is the best I've seen on the Mac, and I've seen them all.

Now that I've gotten used to the tab drawer, I don't want to experience the Web without it. The reason is a bit hard to explain. It's kind of like trying to explain why tabbed browsing is better to someone who assumes "What difference does it make? I'm happy with an open window for every site I'm on -- I just go to the Window menu and pick the one I want!" But the vast majority of the time, once they experience tabbed browsing for a while, they understand.

The tab drawer does not make as great an improvement over tabs as tabs makes over non-tabs. But the difference is real nonetheless. With the additional visual clues from seeing the thumbnails displayed, you can find the one you want a bit quicker, and darnit, it's just more enjoyable to see them all laid out there.

When I first started playing with them I thought they took too much space, because I often have a lot of pages open at once. But I quickly learned otherwise, as I actually used them for real browsing.

Other improvements over, for instance, Safari, include workspaces and the little pop-up window for editing text input areas. Smaller improvements over Safari (at least since the last time I used Safari) include retaining your scroll position in a text input field when you go to another page and return to the one you were editing.

The Mozilla-based browsers such as Firefox, Camino, and Mozilla itself are all very good, but none of them come near to the Cocoa look-and-feel of OmniWeb, and that makes a real difference in my experience. Only Safari is (at least) as good in that area.

OmniGroup technical support has always been excellent. Every comment or question I've had has been responded to in a helpful manner.

5.0 Beta 6.1 had some bugs. They were getting frustrating enough that I considered temporarily trying something else as my default browser until the next beta came out. In fact, yesterday, I downloaded Opera 7.51, which I saw was getting some very good reviews here on VT.

But I quickly saw it was missing some features I depend on with OmniWeb, so I continued using OmniWeb. And then today 5.0 Beta 7 came out. And on the enhancement list, it specifically mentions having fixed every bug I can recall experiencing under 6.1.

If this seems like a rave review, it is. But.... I am not saying OmniWeb is for everyone. Casual Web users (such as my wife) may be better served by Safari, which has all the basic features a Web browser needs. And by presenting fewer advanced features, it may make it a bit easier for casual users to not feel lost.

So I have not suggested that my wife, who gets on the Internet once a week at most, switch to OmniWeb. But I wouldn't consider going back to Safari or another browser unless OmniGroup really drops the ball in the future. And given the fact that they've been around since the NeXT years, there is every reason to think they have the longevity to keep going for a long time.

Note, I'm giving "Quality/Stability" 4 stars based on the fact that this version lists the bugs I can recall as being fixed. I would have given it 2 stars in this category yesterday.