OmniWeb 1.0 for
Nextstep
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Download it!Although Nextstep is widely acclaimed for its streamlined design and intuitive interface, the operating system never gained the massive marketshare that NeXT CEO Steve Jobs had hoped for. Nonetheless, the company has acquired a small, but loyal following among developers (mainly in the finance and telecom industries) who are sold on both object technology and the elegance of the Nextstep development environment. To this audience, Lighthouse Design offers OmniWeb. Created by Omni Development and distributed through Lighthouse, OmniWeb is a full-featured browser that does a respectable job keeping up with the industry fat cats. Although the 1.0 release in early 1995 was underwhelming, 2.0 took a quantum leap forward, supporting background colors, font-size and -color tags, tables, forms, client-side image maps, and frames. In fact, OmniWeb did such a good job at interface design that Netscape seems to have done a little - ahem - borrowing, mimicking OmniWeb's history window and draggable URLs. Of course, Omni is hamstrung by the problems inherent in a minority platform: None of the major plug-ins have been ported to Nextstep, and OmniWeb doesn't support Java. But still, the small company's done a damn fine job keeping up, considering both its minority status and the size of its development team. While Microsoft and Netscape throw dozens of engineers and product managers at each of their browsers, Omni dedicates only a few programmers to OmniWeb. Now, the Omni folks would probably say this speaks to the superiority and efficiency of the Nextstep development environment (NeXT fans do tend to gush), but we'll just say it seems to work.
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