Of all the apps that have come and gone, I think I miss OmniWeb the most. It’s technically “not actively developed”, but you can still download nightly builds that run well. Enough of that though, look at these beautiful tabs!
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Eh, Arc isn’t for me. Tried it, didn’t care for it. The thing about OmniWeb is it was absolutely Mac-like. Great keyboard shortcuts, everything looked and felt right at home. Also had a fantastic “Workspaces” feature to let you save a group of windows and sites. To me, Safari is the most Mac browser out there now, but I always wish someone would take up the mantle and build a real OmniWeb successor.
OmniWeb is “not actively developed” but there are nightly builds???
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I had no idea Vivaldi could do that. I’ll check it out, thanks!
Does Vivaldi have something like Workspaces? I certainly do not remember that, but perhaps it’s a new feature.
That’s the exact reason why I’m running Arc right now. I do not care much for a lot of their gimmicks, but they got Spaces mostly right with instant sync between devices.
Doesn’t look like it.
When people talk about Workspaces most of the time the conversation derives about the session management (separate cookie jars, perhaps even different history…) in the typical personal vs home scenario. Chromium based browsers solve that with workarounds or wrappers around Chrome Profiles and Webkit browsers… well Safari does not have that concept and the Orion team is trying its best (they have Profiles but they do not sync).
This is pretty important and foundational, but I was asking more about the UI aspect of having separate tab groups that hide the rest of tabs even when they share the same session cookies, pretty like the “Tab Groups” feature in Safari. You select your “Workspace” and the rest of the tabs just go away.
It seems that Webkit based browsers have the “Edge” here (see what I did?) because both Safari and Orion have achieved that capability with different UIs (they even keep pinned tabs across browser Windows, something that Chromium based browsers do not do). MS Edge does not have that (Workspaces are collections of bookmarks), and Vivaldi suggests using Tab Stacks to do something similar, but it’s not exactly what Omniweb Workspaces did. Chrome itself does not really care.
Arc also got it perfectly right --although mixing Workspaces and Profile syncing is a little bit tricky. I have Arc Workspaces for every project at work (proposal A, proposal B, project Y) and selecting the workspace allows me to focus on the exact thing I am doing, and adding new tabs just put them on the current workspace. Also, Arc supports having pinned tabs across Workspaces sharing the same Profile (although those would not sync).
There is a new Orión beta release today, I think it is a quite substantial one as they have left behind the previous “tab groups are browser windows” metaphor. Now it has a proper in place tab group switcher, making it more similar to how Safari manages Tab Groups.
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