Netscape has just released version 7.0 of its browser for Mac OS X, offering such innovative features as tabbed browser windows. Microsoft is planning version 5.5 of Internet Explorer for the Mac for a summer release; and Opera is clinging to its status as the fastest and most compact Mac Web browser.

But aficionados of Cocoa ­-- the native Mac OS X programming environment that yields ever-decreasing advantages over Carbon --­ are keeping an eye on a browser called OmniWeb, which is set to shift into high gear with version 5.0, which NewsFactor has learned is set to ship in early 2003.

Cocoa Cutbacks

"We're rewriting the whole display engine, everything above the HTML parser, so it no longer misuses Cocoa classes. Instead, we're going to write a lot more custom classes to make our rendering much faster and much more accurate," William Jon Shipley, president of the Omni Group, told NewsFactor.

As an example of Cocoa's shortcomings, every table in the current version of OmniWeb is a Cocoa "view" object, and every cell inside it is another view.

"It turns out that Cocoa views were never written to support several hundred of them on a window in a scroll view, so there's all kinds of slowness that happens when you do that. It's something we get dinged for all the time, and by just writing our own, very lightweight and much less general-purpose classes, we'll be able to get around it," said Shipley.

Faith in Cocoa

While Shipley's team may be moving some elements away from traditional Cocoa styling, the Omni Group still has faith in that programming environment.

"The Carbon team is starting to figure out some of the great things about Cocoa, and they're incorporating some of it into Carbon, which is good for us Cocoa programmers because Carbon and Cocoa really live together and interrelate," Shipley said.

"The more code they share, the less code there is for Apple to maintain, and the more cool new features we'll see added to both sides. I feel confident in saying that Cocoa can't be killed now because too many people have been infected with how good it is," he added.

Embracing CSS

The Mozilla open source group recently released version 1.0 of its browser, offering users a glimpse of what can be done with real CSS (cascading style sheets) support. In the browser, images can be dragged across the screen and can affect other objects on a page. For instance, a floating sun can be moved around a page, casting changing shadows on other objects. (continued...)

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